I'm worth a million in prizes.
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
It Pays to Increase Your Word Power
This is all I remember from my dream, and I hope the rest of the words will come back to me. In my dream I am changing words; they are diminuendo.
From clover to cover or lover to over or love
From cloven hoof to oven
From clover to cover or lover to over or love
From cloven hoof to oven
POOF!
Sunday, August 07, 2011
Post SWC Syndrome
I have been at a writer's conference, and people have fed me and brought me towels and taken away laundry and driven me places and let me read their poems and hear their stories and watch their plays. They have read my poems and heard some of my stories and watched me act as though I knew what I was talking about in class.
This has been very much an "and" experience and not an "except for" or a "however" one.
I will write more later, but for now, the following remarks will have to suffice:
* Charles Martin is a genius teacher and was able to explain to me not just what is good about my poems but why it's good. This will make me a better writer, because I will know how to find the strengths of a poem and play it up. Why has it taken me so long to realize this is a part of revision?
* Claudia Emerson is a divine teacher and a wonderful reader. And can that woman sing!?!
* Phil Stephens was and is a mensch and a helluva fiction writer, as well as being the only poet I know who's written an epic.
* David Roby is an amazing actor, playwright, oral historian, and genius scholar. No one deserves success more than he does.
* I am humbled by my workshop's critiques of my poems. This level of empathy and support has never happened before.
* I have been on a moth walk (saw dozens of species and picked up katydids and Hercules beetles and an assassin bug).
* I have been on a bird walking expedition and saw many really beautiful birds, none more beautiful than the red-tailed hawk I saw on the golf course. I now want a scope for zeroing in on birds. And better binoculars.
* I have walked by candlelight to Allen Tate's grave and listened to Andrew Hudgins read "The Swimmers."
* I have delighted many people with my nasal Kentucky ay-uck-sent.
* I have bought 23 books and a pair of cowboy boots, as well as a Bakelite bracelet I found at University Thrift Store. I also found a piece of treenware that may pay for all my gas to Sewanee and back. A kind gentleman gave me an antique aquarium of an otter holding a fish bowl. (Pictures forthcoming, I promise).
And, oh, by the way, I will be in BEST NEW POETS 2011. This is kind of like Marianne Moore going to the prom--an unexpected delight! And the fact that it's D.A. Powell who chose my poem ups the ante (and this convoluted simile) to a wrist corsage brought by her date Jack Kerouac, who promises to dance with her to "How High the Moon."
PS I am so glad to be home. I don't suppose Raleigh would bring me coffee every day, though!
PSS My amazing suitemate was also named Pamela. She doesn't like the "PAM" name either.
PSSS I met a beautiful young woman who brought 7 pounds of jewelry to SWC. I thought I traveled heavy!
This has been very much an "and" experience and not an "except for" or a "however" one.
I will write more later, but for now, the following remarks will have to suffice:
* Charles Martin is a genius teacher and was able to explain to me not just what is good about my poems but why it's good. This will make me a better writer, because I will know how to find the strengths of a poem and play it up. Why has it taken me so long to realize this is a part of revision?
* Claudia Emerson is a divine teacher and a wonderful reader. And can that woman sing!?!
* Phil Stephens was and is a mensch and a helluva fiction writer, as well as being the only poet I know who's written an epic.
* David Roby is an amazing actor, playwright, oral historian, and genius scholar. No one deserves success more than he does.
* I am humbled by my workshop's critiques of my poems. This level of empathy and support has never happened before.
* I have been on a moth walk (saw dozens of species and picked up katydids and Hercules beetles and an assassin bug).
* I have been on a bird walking expedition and saw many really beautiful birds, none more beautiful than the red-tailed hawk I saw on the golf course. I now want a scope for zeroing in on birds. And better binoculars.
* I have walked by candlelight to Allen Tate's grave and listened to Andrew Hudgins read "The Swimmers."
* I have delighted many people with my nasal Kentucky ay-uck-sent.
* I have bought 23 books and a pair of cowboy boots, as well as a Bakelite bracelet I found at University Thrift Store. I also found a piece of treenware that may pay for all my gas to Sewanee and back. A kind gentleman gave me an antique aquarium of an otter holding a fish bowl. (Pictures forthcoming, I promise).
And, oh, by the way, I will be in BEST NEW POETS 2011. This is kind of like Marianne Moore going to the prom--an unexpected delight! And the fact that it's D.A. Powell who chose my poem ups the ante (and this convoluted simile) to a wrist corsage brought by her date Jack Kerouac, who promises to dance with her to "How High the Moon."
PS I am so glad to be home. I don't suppose Raleigh would bring me coffee every day, though!
PSS My amazing suitemate was also named Pamela. She doesn't like the "PAM" name either.
PSSS I met a beautiful young woman who brought 7 pounds of jewelry to SWC. I thought I traveled heavy!
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Remembering You as Silhouette and Ash
WIDDERSHINS
You come to me in a dream that’s a wash of grey over pen and ink lines (Koh-I-Noor ones you loved to draw); you’re wearing your pearl-grey suit because grey suits you; your hair curls like smoke, the way it once did when you smoked, you ask, Pamela, do you see me? I haven’t been this thin in years! You’re flat-black construction paper;
--This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test. We now return these words to your regularly scheduled poetry notebook. Had this been an actual poem, it would have shown up elsewhere.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Children's Carnival, Paul Landacre
Harvey's studio is cleaned out--everything is blank in preparation for Raleigh's move into that space. The painter comes tomorrow to give her the sapphire walls of her dreams. When I stand in the completely empty space that held such laughter and light and clutter and collage and where we read so many books together and took so many naps together and laughed and loved each other so much on his bed of books (headboard and footboard were bookshelves), I feel like the woodcut above--everything in my life is bleached of color and breached of joy. What should be wonderful (redecorating, reclaiming, restoring this 1880s Queen Anne) feels curiously colorless at times, as though I am painting from a child's tin of watercolors and no wash sticks to the brush, and the thick white paper with its curious tooth and texture stays blank.
Can I just write that I hate being single? Can I just add that I hate dating just as much? Can I just add that although he worked primarily in black and white, Harvey gave my life its calliope, its coherence, its context? I have gone from carnival to colorless...
Friday, July 15, 2011
A Year and a Day: Alchemy of the Light
This is Algerian Shops, a painting by Louis Comfort Tiffany. (How I love his middle name). The work begins--the real work of bringing warmth and heat and life back into my home and life. I have been sad and will be sad, but it's also time to look at the light again. I love Hopper's light for its solitude; I love the coppers and golds and bronzes and cafes-aux-or of this painting by Tiffany for its liveliness, its bizarre bazaar/brazier warmth.
(I stopped at a yard sale today and bought a brand-new lavender candle. I'm luxuriating in its scent right now. Lavender for remembering and warmth and dreaming of France. Someday I'll go...Lavender also reminds me of The Spoils of Poynton and Rebecca, great houses with dust sheets and treasures and the scent of lavender ghosting the air in stately sarcophagi of rooms. I don't want my house to be like that. Lavender, yes; sarcophagus, no).
A pomander with lavender--there's a start...
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Sean Hayes/Boom Boom
Boom boom goes the day
This is the last day I saw my husband alive...he was singing to me from Sean Hayes' music on the way to Sewanee. Harvey, I love you, I will never forget you, and I will write to honor your memory, the way you wanted.
Everyone say just a little word more....
Tell your love that you do and you will and will always...
Thursday, July 07, 2011
This I Believe
"Typewriters have souls." (The Manitou, 1978 horror film)
______
Today's OneWord writing practice: CAST
Cast of characters; cast-off sculpture in the chalk-edged garden, cast of my arm, wrenched from its socket and snapped like a sapling in a storm while playing among nasturtium; think castoff or castaway or cast my lot, think Castile soap, (washes out her mouth when the words are wrong); think castanets clicking off the beat of time of the beat-up girl who cannot keep the beat and her father slaps her till her Cuban heels come down correctly (the studio dyes her hair, plucks her eyebrows, her hairline, casts off her name, and she's cast as Gilda).
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
Kahlo
“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
Monday, July 04, 2011
Envoi: Here is What I Believe as a Writer
From the preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
Sunday, July 03, 2011
Purged
I have finished editing my possessions. The carpets are being cleaned on Tuesday. After that I rearrange and resort, clean off my closets and paint two rooms, buy a little furniture for Raleigh and the den, and pack for Sewanee. While I'm there, I'll plan a deck and a backyard garden for next year.
I don't know whether I'll continue this blog. My friends read my Facebook posts, not here, and most of my favorite blogs have gone private, so I don't feel the sense of community that I once did.
I don't know whether I'll continue this blog. My friends read my Facebook posts, not here, and most of my favorite blogs have gone private, so I don't feel the sense of community that I once did.
Friday, July 01, 2011
Absent
3652 books--with more to go.
All of Harvey's clothes from his studio.
50 pairs of shoes gone (45 pairs of these were mine).
Sixteen bags of clothes donated.
Three dressers, two mirrors, two tables, and a desk donated/given away.
All three of Harvey's expensive suits--given away.
Basketball goal, swing set, lawn furniture--sent for scrap.
Three truckloads of miscellaneous china and antiques sent for auction.
One dumpster filled with all of Harvey's old art project materials--half dissected encyclopedias, books, boxes.
Discoveries: A pair of amethyst and black pearl earrings that Harvey had bought me--stuck away in a trunk. His self-portrait in watercolor. Art, art, art that I'd never seen before. 10 pairs of reading glasses.
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