Richard Speakes

He was the first teacher who believed in my work. He made me believe that with the tithe of talent I had and the hard work I could commit to doing, I might someday write a poem.

He also gave me the great gift of Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, which is a necessary read for me. Here's an excerpt, which I reread on Marylinn's blog today:

What a silly thing we do. We sweat through poem after poem to realize what dumb animals know by instinct and reveal in their behavior: my life is all I've got. We are well off to know it ourselves, even if our method of learning it is painfully convoluted."

I let "life" get in the way of an MFA, in the way of writing without a school as spinal column. A marriage, a miscarriage, a grievous loss of friends and my beloved grandmother, and my own lack of self-confidence and commitment got in the way of writing. This was totally my own psyche and choice. Harvey always encouraged me; I always discouraged myself. When I turned back to writing, the way a backslider returns to the prayer rail to confess her slipshod ways and rededicate her life to something bigger than she is, Hugo and Harvey both supported me. In a strange way, Hugo was my low/no-residency Northwest teacher.


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James Galvin: Murray State University

From another teacher--my first workshop instructor, teaching his first class--I learned little. This was totally my fault. I signed up for his class only because my best friend thought he was cute and didn't want to be in a night class by herself. I sat there and read poems by other students, wrote some jingles of my own, and thought, So what? Then I heard him read his own poems and was entranced by The Word.

Since then, I've studied his work and read his fiction and nonfiction. From him, I learned how to teach the poetic line. Here's the poem that serves as springboard:

Art Class
by James Galvin

Let us begin with a simple line,
Drawn as a child would draw it,
To indicate the horizon,

More real than the real horizon,
Which is less than line,
Which is visible abstraction, a ratio.

The line ravishes the page with implications
Of white earth, white sky!

The horizon moves as we move,
Making us feel central.
But the horizon is an empty shell—

Strange radius whose center is peripheral.
As the horizon draws us on, withdrawing,
The line draws us in,

Requiring further lines,
Engendering curves, verticals, diagonals,
Urging shades, shapes, figures…

What should we place, in all good faith,
On the horizon? A stone?
An empty chair? A submarine?

Take your time. Take it easy.
The horizon will not stop abstracting us.

Maybe I'm Amazed

I'm very excited to receive a Pushcart nomination for my poem, "Linea Nigra," which is a broadside. Click on the link above to see the complete list of nominations from Blue Fifth Review.


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Mark Jarman

I'm not grateful for much this season, but I am grateful for my teachers. Here's one of my favorite poems. Mark Jarman taught me that poetry is like anything else you love: Give it more than you think you hold, and don't worry how it reciprocates.

The Black Riviera--Mark Jarman

(for Garrett Hongo)

There they are again. It's after dark.
The rain begins its sober comedy,
Slicking down their hair as they wait
Under a pepper tree or eucalyptus,
Larry Dietz, Luis Gonzalez, the Fitzgerald brothers,
And Jarman, hidden from the cop car
Sleeking innocently past. Stoned,
They giggle a little, with money ready
To pay for more, waiting in the rain.

They buy from the black Riviera
That silently appears, as if risen,
The apotheosis of wet asphalt
And smeary-silvery glare
And plush inner untouchability.
A hand takes money and withdraws,
Another extends a plastic sack--
Short, too dramatic to be questioned.
What they buy is light rolled in a wave.

They send the money off in a long car
A god himself could steal a girl in,
Clothing its metal sheen in the spectrum
Of bars and discos and restaurants.
And they are left, dripping rain
Under their melancholy tree, and see time
Knocked akilter, sort of funny,
But slowing down strangely, too.
So, what do they dream?

They might dream that they are in love
And wake to find they are,
That outside their own pumping arteries,
Which they can cargo with happiness
As they sink in their little bathyspheres,
Somebody else's body pressures theirs
With kisses, like bursts of bloody oxygen,
Until, stunned, they're dragged up,
Drawn from drowning, saved.

In fact, some of us woke up that way.
It has to do with how desire takes shape.
Tapered, encapsulated, engineered
To navigate an illusion of deep water,
Its beauty has the dark roots
Of a girl skipping down a high-school corridor
Selling Seconal from a bag,
Or a black car gliding close to the roadtop,
So insular, so quiet, it enters the earth.

______

I love the myth the last stanza evokes.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

This is as close to how I feel as it's possible to get. John Hannah, thank you for this performance; Richard Curtis, thank you for this screenplay; W.H. Auden, thank you for the poem.

Adimpleate--to fill up. Replete--to fill again and again. Bereft--To be emptied.

From gratis, meaning without charge, free

Thanks--W.S Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster
and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Nine years ago....

Here is happiness--one and one making one.

Although the camera says October, this is Thanksgiving 2001--right after Harvey bought me the house of my dreams--our Queen Anne. Daniel was a junior in high school. Raleigh was 4 years old. We were so much in love and so excited about our new "1880s" house. And we were happily married; in nearly every photograph I have of Harvey he flaunted that wedding ring. (Part of it was that he had such beautiful hands and liked to show them off, but he also liked being married).

Now our little yellow house is no longer the house of my dreams. It needs much work, but I'm making progress. Daniel is a junior in college, living and working on his own. Raleigh is in eighth grade, making straight A's, in all-district band, and dating. Daniel and Raleigh are both growing in delight and wisdom, growing up.

This photo marks a turning point. Three months later, we moved into the house where I now sit. Right after that, I started getting sick--lupus, kidney problems, and all the depression that comes with chronic illness/not feeling normal. The steroids that were required made me gain a lot of weight. (And not just the steroids--so did Doritos and all the wonderful meals we cooked in our tiny kitchen).

Four years after this photo, Harvey had a heart attack. He made an amazing recovery and had no permanent heart damage. Four years after that, I had a series of strokes, after which Harvey took incredible care of me. He helped me walk and relearn how to balance. He helped me learn to read and remember more than a paragraph at a time. He helped me relearn to type when the fingers of my left hand didn't work. He helped me learn to hold a pencil and to articulate my thoughts again. No one else would have done that for me. I am able to walk for miles now. Except for not being able to garden (lupus requires me to limit the time I'm out in the sun), I've made a full recovery from everything. Today, I can also announce that I have officially lost all of the weight. I weigh what I did when I had Raleigh 13-1/2 years ago. For that I'm thankful. I can now wear clothing that I haven't been able to wear for nearly a decade. I'm going to wear my oldest pair of Levis today and still have room for pumpkin cheesecake.

What will happen 2 years from now (the next four year cycle)? I can't imagine...

Harvey this year died, for no discernible reason. Not even an autopsy can tell us why I lost my only love; our children, their father; his students, their beloved gifted/talented teacher; his friends, their most steadfast and ardent supporter. Parts of me died along with him. I know that. I (somewhat) accept that. Although 23 years wasn't a long time, I'm thankful that I had Harvey as long as I did. And look at that smile--he was happy. I was happy. We made each other happy. He was the making of me.

I'm trying my best not to be sad today, but it's hard. Today all words are plebeian.

Wonderful husband, amazing teacher, artist extraordinaire--I will never forget you.

This is my beloved and this is my friend.

Ecclesiastes 7:4 and Edith: Scattershot Notes

"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of the fool is in the house of mirth."

Thus sayeth the Preacher.

In The House of Mirth: Lily Bart may be understood as the Tarot Fool: In joyous search of new experiences, carelessless leads to precipice.
_______

29 years, 29 chapters. (Is this the truism of 29 and holding?) The structure of The House of Mirth is as precise as a tool-and-die fitting.

"I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else."

Lily Bart, to Selden (Literary naturalism/determinism/machinism)
_______

"How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman."

Thus sayeth Lily Bart.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own." Virginia Woolf writes, much later, in "A Room of Her Own."
_______



Ah, Lily Bart. I come to understand you, tortoiseshell hairpins arranged on the deal dresser, water glass and chloral drops on the nightstand. You're as locked into your fate as any other Darwinistic/naturalistic hero. Survival of the fairest is not the same as survival of the fittest.

All is vanity plays out till the end on that dresser top.

One of the things that I like best about literature is the notion of inverting/torquing/exploding cliche. In the works of Elizabeth Bishop (especially my beloved "Crusoe in England"), No Place like Home twists into Home is No Place. Safe as Houses takes on a different meaning in the book I'm reading now, Martin Roper's Gone. (I think Home Is No Place might be the ultimate theme of Gone--more on that later, after I finish). Certainly, a major theme of The House of Mirth is All Conquers Love.

Harvey and I planned to design a series of samplers with these inverted cliches. Maybe I'll find a way to graph them myself.

Bah, Humbug; Harumph; Crotchety Crotchety Crotchety

"And Tom brought him chicken soup until he wanted to kill him. The lore has not died out of the world, and you will still find people who believe that soup will cure any hurt or illness and is no bad thing to have for the funeral either."

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Let’s all blame Steinbeck for this series of self-help “books.”

Note to the Universe:

Dear Book Gifter:

Do not send me another copy of Chicken Soup for the Single's Soul. I am not uncoupled.

I would, however, be interested in receiving, and stockpiling, the following:

Chicken Soup for the Vegan's Soul;
Chicken Soup for the Weasel's Soul;
Chicken Soup for the Quisling's Soul.

Thank you for prompt attention to this matter.

Yours till the pot bubbles over,

Pamela


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Symphony of Sorrowful Songs - Henryk Górecki - 1st movement

I miss you. I see you in everything. I will see you again.

Stevie Wonder - "As"

Until the day that is the day that are no more...




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Lost in Translation: Dreams, Lines, Words

I've been having weird dreams about the Hanged Man--as an image. This led me back to 1977 and French Lit class. Here's a little Villon from Ballade des Pendus:

And the rain has soaked us and has laved us clean,
And the sun has withered us and turned us black.
Ravens and crows have hollowed out our eyes
And plucked away our beards, our eyebrows too.
Never at any time are we at rest;
Swayed this way and then that, as the wind wills,
It pushes us about, just as it pleases,
More beaked by birds than any tailor's thimble.

On translation: Michael Cunningham writes in his introduction to Death in Venice that all writing is translation, that the ideal words in a writer's head and heart never transfer through her pen or keyboard into the work of art she imagined. I agree. I also agree that all translation (foreign language, erasure, cutup) is rigorous right-brain exercise, and I need something disciplined. The Song of Songs translation is too raw emotionally for me to attempt right now. So I return to the one word site for freewriting, and to translation in spots or splotches to stay with poetry. I like to think we're married (not in the sense of antique furniture, where two discrete pieces try to pass themselves off as one) but in the sense that maybe we're joined at the metrical foot.

Thanksgiving is fast approaching, and I'm not feeling particularly thankful. I need to focus more on what's here than what's not. (A line about Death sucks a rotten tooth comes to mind
I used to post five things for which I'm grateful--maybe I should do that again.

Rafiki's vocabulary, especially the chirrups when I come home;
Shadow's Grumpy=the-dwarf grumbling snores;
Spearmint flannel pajamas;
Garnet and topaz fall leaves and the girl who dives into them;
High heels, higher heels, highest heels.

These things adimpleate (see yesterday) my days; #4 and #5 surely erase my vultuous nature. ( http://www.savethewords.org/ )



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Adimpleating Time and Space

I adimpleate my teacup. I adimpleate my gas tank. I adimpleate my time on this planet till I can be with Harvey again.

Today: Library (ILL), Mailbox (fixed up and mail picked up). OneWord writing (a retread of one of my childhood superheroes). Cats fed and wrangled. Thrifting with no bargains in sight. I found a skirt but will wait till it's reduced from $3 to $1 on Friday. If it's not there, I'll adimpleate my shopping cart with something else.

I make a pie. I make a bed. I make a mess of things. I start over.

PS Can you tell I adopted a word today?



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One Word: Cowboy

TO GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE WE GO


Cowboy is pruning my grandmother's yellow roses; Cowboy is carefully cutting them where they fork like highways on a road map. Cowboy wears a straw hat and overalls; he doesn't wear boots or blue jeans or a hat like Roy Rogers does, what Daddy calls a Stetson, so how he can be a cowboy? He doesn't even have a horse, and he has rakes and shovels and big old scissors instead of a shotgun or a pistol. Cowboy is older than Daddy, and I don't know why Grandmother calls him yard boy. He is taller than a yard by far, and Grandmother calls what he works in garden and what he works on lawn. I don't understand how I can be a girl at 5 and he can be a boy at maybe 40. Maybe my mother will explain this to me one day, but right now she says hush and swats me with a rolled-up Ladies Home Journal when I don't.

Rob Brezney's Astrology and Chilly Receptions

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the 1925 silent film The Gold Rush,Charlie Chaplin plays a prospector during the Alaska Gold Rush. After a series of adventures, he finds himself stuck in a remote cabin on Thanksgiving Day with a ruffian named Big Jim. They're out of food, so Charlie gets resourceful, boiling his right shoe in a big pot and serving it up steaming hot. What the audience doesn't know is that the movie prop is made of sweet licorice, not leather. So while it may seem that dinner is a hardship, the actors actually had no trouble polishing off their meal. I see a similar scenario in your near future, Cancerian: something like eating a "shoe" that's made of candy.

_______

Well, maybe that will make it tastier when I put my foot in my mouth. (I have had shoes that were brand-named Candies, but that's beside the point). I have been awfully distracted lately and curt and abrupt. I know that my children and I have lost the most precious person in the world to us, that I have had shingles and lupus and insomnia and kidney infections, but that's no excuse for being rude. And I've been ruddy rude. I hope the universe will accept my apologies. I swear I will be a better daughter, mother, teacher, in-law, outlaw, and friend as soon as these steroids wear off.


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Housewifery

Continuities
by Walt Whitman

(From a talk I had lately with a German spiritualist)

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

__________
Nothing is ever lost--All the King's Men.

I feel lost. I am not nothing, because nothing is ever lost. I must be something.

Excuse my brief foray into self-esteem.

Today's ONEWORD.COM: MARKET

To market to market and home again home again...Harvey and I loved going to the Nashville flea market--pralines and pashimas and spices and odd bargains on frankincense and myrrh...He always told me we should set up a booth there. I told him Lie down with fleas and get up with bargains. We both loved the marquetry of the market--treasure of postcards and rhinestones and ribbons and pottery in tiny rectangles of booths--fountain pens and pharaohs, cabinets and candy jars and programs for dance cotillions...We made the unexpected purchase and regretted the bargains that got away...the pink crocheted gloves, the angel print that wouldn't fit in the car, the ABC blocks that were tramp art... I regret everything--every trinket we didn't purchase, every second we spent apart from the pleasure of just looking. I remember so many things--the giant red Buddha (nearly 4 feet tall and he's only a bust) and recall Harvey's delight in him--a child's face when he sees a pony captured perfectly on a 42-year-old canvas. I look at the pink and black (and monocled!) penguin and remember Harvey rushing to tell me that he'd found a treasure, and I said, No, first you have to see this amazing cookie jar. No, you have to see what I found--and as we quibbled he led me toward the corner of the Mule Barn, exactly where I wanted to go. When we reached the booth, what we'd debated turned out to be the same thing--that cookie jar! The dealer had already wrapped it. I knew that one of you'd be back...We only had $8 between us, five for him and three for me, and that's the only thing we could buy that week. We were so poor we couldn't afford laundry so went to in-laws the next weekend to wash clothes. But we--no I--have that cookie jar and that Buddha and these memories: A plique-a-jour dragonfly, a pair of Chinese temple screens, 25 Bakelite bracelets, 15 globes, an Art Deco sculpture, the Matisse print that turned out to be real and not a reproduction...and so many months of holding hands and sharing popcorn and picnicking out of the back of his grandparents' old Crown Victoria...pimiento cheese and Pringles and Pepsi and peanuts and paper plates and Pamela and Harvey and I thought it would never end...but it did.

I'm going back to the Nashville flea market in the spring, and I'm going to discover the perfect inkwell. Half of the journey is anticipation, imagining what you'll see. I half-expect to glimpse his firefly-green shirt an aisle over, to hear his whisper behind me:Whatever you're selling, I'm buying. We won't even haggle over the cost....

One Word: Materials (Not Enough Time)

alencon lace (I see you through a veil)

broadcloth (the prairie sprawls and undulates),

burlap (kittens in a sack you rescue them)

calico (aprons and flour sack frocks cut up for your quilt)

cambric (handkerchief of the Lord, I embroider an H)

canvas (an artist's model shivers in the corner, the artist is you the model is me)

chino (you called them your lawyer pants, wore them when you were permanently pressed for funds)

corduroy (kings cloth, Thomas Hart Benton's furrowed fields, fretted like your old Gibson)

crepe (my 20s de chine dress cut on the bias, flowers over my hip bones petals and branches over my ribs),

denim (your thigh sliding through the wicket of mine in the doorway where we first kissed),

felt (wetting wool, rubbing wool, a congress of wet sheep in an Irish pub we visit),

flannel (your shirt still warm from your skin, I steal it for a quick trip to the kitchen)

gabardine (your three-piece suit with its vest, its watch chain and fob, the suit I couldn't bury you in)

gingham (cheery kitchen curtains with cross-stitched roosters, I am scrambling the first eggs I'll make for you)

lame (drag queen who made you laugh your lustiest at "You're Not Woman Enough to Take My Man" and the swaggering hips of the singer, the waterfall of gold over them),

linen (the tan and black suit I wore on our first Easter, the one that fits again because I can't eat/don't cook without you)

madras (a plaid we didn't like, a city we wanted to visit)

muslin (that impossibly small antique blouse, leg-o-mutton sleeves and lace collar on which you pinned for me a cameo)

nylon (your thumbnail sends a millipede skittering down my stocking)

organza (the sheer fabric, the topnotes of gardenia in a perfume you picked out),

satin (slick sheets you'd throw off the bed)

serge (the ocean's undertow, all these layers stitched together)

silk (one of the few fabrics that will shatter, as mirrors do, as I have)

twill (classic fabric, archaic contraction, twill never be better)

velvet (the feel of your skin, there)

wool (it made you itch, o I would scratch your back)

worsted (these days the way they're woven, warp and weft and what's looming)

_____________
I encourage you all to go to the oneword site. I always get good practice from this. Today's efforts are turning into a freewritten abcedarian. I wonder if I can keep any of these images or lines.

Rest in Peace, Henryk Gorecki, 1933-2010

The 21st Century's Dorian Gray

Perhaps the most beautiful face in music!



Perhaps the most beautiful bass line. And the best high notes since Roy Orbison.

For years these were my theme songs.


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Remembering Anne Sexton, Born This Day

Wanting to Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

_______
Oh, Anne Sexton, mistress of metaphor, sweetheart of simile, wonderful poet and playwright, beautiful woman in torment, how I wish there were more work of yours to read. Someday, I'll write about how important you are in my understanding poetry, but not today. Today, I don't pick up the carpenter's toolbox, but there were days before Harvey came into my life, came for me, when I understood the hammer and the awl and the T-square, knew every step of the dance in iron shoes. Because of you, I understand transformation. Because of you, I understand it hurts.

(I hold in my hands today a copy of Transformations complete with personal correspondence, a gift from my friend Chet. I love this book).

Takei Takeo (A Journey Round My Skull)

In the darkness that floods each day, is there a prism?



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Two Books, Two Dozen Years, and Today

I'm holding my second chapbook, Other Four-Letter Words, which just came in the mail. It's available from Finishing Line Press and it's a beautifully printed book. Here's the link through Finishing Line:

http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm

The book should be available via Amazon very soon, as well.

If you want to see (and hear) other poems so you have a feel for my work, go here:

memorypalacewalk.com

I just went to the link for A Walk Through the Memory Palace, and I made the mistake of listening to "Archaic Fragments." Harvey is the primary reader in that poem, and I am just destroyed to hear his voice.

On this, the day that we first met 24 years ago, it's fitting that I hold in my hands the book dedicated to him.

FOR HARVEY
SONG OF SONGS 5:16

That verse isn't on the dedication page. Here's my translation from the Hebrew.

His mouth is sweetness itself; he is altogether lovely.
This is my lover and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.

Harv was sweetness itself, and he was altogether lovely. I know I'll never have another lover; I'll also never have another friend like Harvey.

Instead of the sweet mouth, I taste my own brackish tears. Sorrow pervades everything that I do, even the happy moments. It's my own yard, as WC Williams' speaker puts it in "The Widow's Lament in Springtime;" it's also my shade garden, my rose bed, the plot of land I bought for our marker.

REWIND: I forget for a few seconds that he's gone. The first impulse I had was to call Harvey and tell him, Hurry home, honey, and bring the champagne. He would have enjoyed the serendipity of the book showing up today.

FAST FORWARD: I remember a line from a poem ("Rehearsal for Living Without You," in the new book): These garnets I hold are cold fire. Harvey loved to give me garnets--I'm wearing one of the rings today. Neither of us knew they were the widow's gemstone. Garnet to Garnet--Is this the way? wrote Emily Dickinson. Is it? Is it? Is it? The needle's frozen in that song's interrogative groove.

Poetry's Final Examination: Trust Your...

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader of poetry.--Robert Frost

I don't agree with all of Frost's aesthetics, but I believe this, with all my heart and both my ears.

For Radish: Handel's Dixit Dominus on youtube

I'm thinking of you today and praying for peace for you today. I hope that you find comfort in music, art, and books. Even more importantly, take comfort in the fact that you have reared a man of gentleness, sensibility and kindness in a world that usually offers none of these to its children.

I wasn't sure whether to choose Mozart or Handel, but I picked Handel because of the violins.

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