Post in Which I Don't Curl Up like an Ammonite

"The difference is privileging in literature a hero as opposed to a heroine. The difference is dismissing anguish that is seen as feminine, and not “universal” (i.e. masculine). Perhaps Gregor Samsas also take the form, in literature, of 18-year-old chorus girls, or unravelling divorcees, or suicidal overachievers from a prestigious woman’s college."  Kate Zambreno, Heroines

Feminine pain--from cramps to childbirth--doesn't count; it's the curse.  You bear it because you're female.  It's bearable because you're female.  You're female.  Grin and bear it.

Men, however, can be terrible cowards over a toothache, or an ingrown hair, or a sore toe, and it's "Boys will be boys." That sick-male cliche makes me want to punch a pillow. Damned if they can cry at movies, though, or have tears well up when their children are born.  That's girly.

I am 1000 times braver than Harvey was.  And it didn't make him less manly.  Or me less female.

I am more Medusa than Penelope.  More Klytemnestra than Cleaver, June.

I bare it.  I bear it.  I bore it.  I have borne it.

And if my daughter EVER hears that she needs to be more of a lady, to be girlier, I know she'll take out someone's kneecap.

And if my son is EVER ashamed to cry from happiness, then I have failed as a parent.

Share |

Happy Thanksgiving

Corn on the car--I have this postcard.  I love the lemon wheels and the convertible.  We found it in a little antique shop in Carbondale.  (We being Harvey and I, and I can no longer use we any more, because there is no we, no Pamela and Harvey, no Pamela and Dez, no royal we because I am not royalty or even a pretender to the throne like Anastasia Anna Anderson, although I am as Russian as many Romanovs).

Word of the day:  DRIVE

And sometimes Dez would put the top down on his Jag and we'd drive and drive and drive and my hair would fray from its French braid and hit him in the face and we'd laugh and laugh and laugh just being together driving fast and the simplest stupidest things would make us so happy and there would be velocity in the days and velocity in the nights and it just figures that on the day of gratitude he would be in Norway and I would be inching back toward spinsterhood and

Hello.

I have no ambition.  No motivation.  No--well--drive.

(No commas in paragraph three in honor of the Radish King).

TRUTHS THAT I DON'T WANT TO ADMIT:
1. I am terrible at being single. I am worse at being a girlfriend.  I was good at being Harvey's wife.  And that leads me to #2, which is that
2. I am pissed at Harvey for dying.  I am so angry that I cannot forgive him for dying.  I know it's stupid.  How do I forgive losing my best friend and partner and husband, and I am sure that this has led to the realization that
3. Being really sick doesn't make me saintly.  It makes me mean and whiny and I can't stop looking at my biopsy site which is now the size of a saccharine tablet or those new awful pink candy hearts on Facebook posts, which leads me to muse on the following
4.  What do I put on Facebook (oh I wish this was a joke).  I am not in a relationship but I still feel kind of married.  It is complicated. I am no longer a wife and no longer a fiancee and no longer a girlfriend and no longer a lover, and I am not really a widow, which leads me to the following monostich
5.  In the middle of WIDOW is I DO--which is just meat in the beartrap jaws of those W's.

Share |

For Dez: VARYKINO

In my deepest fantasies, I am a Russian heroine kissing her love farewell at a train station.  There are furs and tears and troikas, and maybe a little Tchaikovsky in the background, and (to steal a line from Spencer Reece), "snow falls like rice."

I think Dr. Zhivago has had a pathological effect on my idea of romance.  I dream of this dacha, often.

Tomorrow my last love leaves for Norway.  For work.  For three years.  There were no sables or sleighs, no symphonies, but tears last night, this morning?  Falling:  Articles from a Russian sentence, satin strap slithering from a shoulder, spill of sheets to the floor the first night we made love.

Whiteness for me is elegiac, the edges of an old photograph,

That out of the frame.  

Here is a snowglobe all shaken.

Here is a love slipcovered in frost.

Here is a woman who has had her Russian, her romance and her stereotypical end.

Here is her life with ice at its heart.

Warm me up; I'm so cold.

Mosaic, Part Two

I still think that broken is beauty potentiated.

Share |

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44824832@N00/7415484404/

RESOLUTION:  I am going to take care of myself, my children, my art: 

"The artist has to love, he has to love what he is making...so that beauty may become connatural to him and inviscerate itself in him through affection, and so that his work may come forth from his heart and his bowels as well as from his lucid spirit. This undeviating love is the supreme rule." Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism

In words of one syllable:

 1. LOVE YOUR OWN WORK BEST.
2. WRITE FROM THE HEART, WRITE FROM THE GUT, WRITE FROM THE SOUL.
3. WORK TILL IT FEELS PART OF YOU.
4. YOUR WORK IS PART OF YOU. 

5. AS DALE RAY SAYS, TAKE CARE OF YOUR WORK, AND YOUR WORK WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU.

 

Detritus, Krissy Wilson

I've been thinking, as I often do when ill, about what remains, about remainders, about clay columns of pipes, china doll heads, singleton chess pieces, sea glass, transferware fragments, all sorts of shards that line the water's edge....all the pieces I looked for once, what remains after the descent into the river of grief.  What remains of me?  I miss Harvey, and yet I fell in love again.  And came up gasping.  I was immersed.  And I need the sky.  And I need souvenirs, something that shows I came, I saw, I loved.

I think I fought so fiercely against the Pretty Boy and longed to lean into his embrace simultaneously, because he's probably my last love.  

I told him goodbye.  Months ago.  I stopped taking his calls.  

And I waited for my life to go on.  And it did.  In  a mosaic sort of way:  Start.  Smash.  Rebuild out of the pieces. 

For the past week, out of nowhere, I fell apart.  I fell into fever, into shaking chills, into the topography of crimson rashes and a purple-as-the-center-of-Queen-Anne's lace breast lesion, into the arms of the ER doctor and into my sickbed.  Friends had to teach for me; co-workers had to cover my shifts; my father had to drive me to a doctor's appointment.  I had scarlet fever.  I had a MRSA infection without any visible signs of a cut.  I had a breast lesion that required multiple biopsies (and my sister died of breast carcinoma, with symptoms like this).  My hair changed texture.  The soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers peeled away, like onionskin.  The skin over my whole body sloughed.  I had shingles--a raspberry patch over my left scapula.  

Today, after 10 days of antibiotics, I'm weak but otherwise fine.  My biopsies were negative, although I have another one scheduled after the rash, just to be sure.  There's nothing but bruising on my breast to indicate I was ever ill.  (And eight pounds disappeared from somewhere--but I cannot see where).  My skin looks better than ever. And yet, I'm falling apart.  

During that time of extreme illness, somehow he knew I was ill.  Somehow he knew I was afraid of dying, as my sister did, from a breast cancer that was diagnosed out of nowhere.  And he knew just when to call, and he knew just what to say:  You lose your breast?  I still love you.  And  You lose your hair?  I still love you.  You love me and all my hair fall out, right?  And he researched reconstruction and trompe-l'oueil nipple tattooing, and he said all the right things, in the broken English and that Badenov accent, and oh my god he is so pretty.   

And the guy whom I've been seeing?  He found out I was sick and had to have a breast biopsy and broke it off with me.  Not a word, not a text, not a phone call in days.  I guess he's gone to BOOBS R US to look for a new sweetheart.  

Today, after thinking about love and loss and the likelihood of ever being someone else's baby, I've decided.   I'm making something new out of something old.   

I'm 55, and I'm tired of running.  I'm staying put in my house with my daughter for at least the next two years.  No more fantasies of moving to Nashville, to Norfolk, to a teaching job of my dreams.  It's here for two years.  

He's 43 and moving to Norway for five years (long-term job, leaving right before Thanksgiving).  He has no furlough for months.  

You are the love of my whole damned life, he tells me.  

The love of my life died, I tell him. 

I lost my wife and my son, he tells me.  I won't lose you.  

You don't have me, I tell him.  

I have you repeatedly, he tells me. 

Can you dial 1-800-IMPASSE?  

He's a conundrum:  innovative, intuitive lover; maddening, jealous fiend.  The only letter he ever wrote to me was 3-1/2 pages on how Barack Obama saved the American economy, and one sentence about my eyes blue as fjords. 

 

He's economically dishonest but emotionally honest, and that's another conundrum.  

Next week we say goodbye to something, if not farewell, with food and flowers and physicality that I thought had ended with Harv.  (As the French say, formidable.  As he says, хуй его знает).

 

After that?  I have no idea.  All I know is that I don't know how to feel this way.  I have forgotten how to feel.  

I think of the artificial songbird from "The Emperor and the Nightingale." I sing her song.  What's left of love is a locket that won't stay shut.  What's left of my heart is a sprung gear. 

What do I make of this? 

Share |

Caravaggio in Kentucky

NARCISSUS: NARKE

Water takes you in.

For days the gods talk
Of nothing but your

Spine in the dark, white
Coral, of how fish

School into your dead

Calm. And still water
Gives you back: thirsting,

Already bent to drink.

(originally published in Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry)

Share |

Southern Festival of Books--Photos, Butch Coone, Wunderkind

Chet Weise, Bang Candy Company, rocking the Marshmallow credo:  "Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy marshmallows, which are kind of the same thing."

 Daniel Nathan Terry, showing us his tattoo, before he reads some beautiful poems.

Three Poets:  Joshua Marie Wilkinson, superstar; Chet Weise, supercool; yours truly, super-accessorized.  Please note $3 cowboy boots, which I scooped up at a Nashville yard sale, as well as great dress and not one but two irons--one flat, one sad.  (And I have never realized that 5 feet 4 inches, even in cowboy boots that add another inch, is so flippin' petite).

Share |

One Ring to Write Them All: Pamela Wears Sterling and Reads a Poem after James Dickey's "Cherrylog Road"

I was told by a fancy Southern journal:  "We love your poem about James Dickey, and we will never, ever publish it."

Perhaps that's the best--and most truthful--rejection letter I'll ever receive.  My poem takes Dickey to task for writing a poem in which a teenage speaker (male) has sex with another teenager (a young woman) in a junkyard, then roars off on his motorcycle, and leaves her without a goodbye, much less an orgasm.  

Throughout Dickey's poem, Doris is completely silent, so I gave her lines and a backstory, and I have her talk about sex--how it wasn't good for her--and church and whippings and how men use women and how women are both trapped and able to escape that world and that mindset.  (Can women say that? Bad sex? Men being selfish?  Can you write about that? one Nashville reader asked me).  

Well, this woman did.  And I read it in Nashville at the Southern Festival of Books.  

Oh, yeah, there's a little strychnine in there.  And snake handling.  And movie magazines and Mary Worth and my favorite lipstick, Cherries in the Snow.  And a couple of black dresses and the Begats in a red-letter Bible.

If anyone ever publishes this poem, I'll be surprised.  That's not the point, really.  I know I'm a better writer for having written it.   It's going in my next collection, which is probably going to be called BACK TALK.

Photo by Butch Coone, Bang Candy Company Reading, Southern Festival of Books

Share |

GEORGE MICHAEL: "KISSING A FOOL" - Royal Opera House, Sunday 6/11/11

Share|

SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

Card 1 (The Sun) : How you feel about yourself now  »

You are feeling abundant happy and joyful - if you don't, be assured that you are about to enter a period of success and fulfillment. This is a time of pleasure, vitality and good health, travel and holidays to be enjoyed. Good news around children or the conception or birth of a longed-for baby. The Sun heralds an ending to difficulties and a time to celebrate with friends and loved ones.

Card 2 (Wheel Of Fortune) : What you most want at this moment  »

The cards suggest that what you most want at this time is a turning point in your life and positive change - well expect it now. Life will go up a gear or two and events will accelerate forward. Destiny is at play here - have you noticed a number of events that seem rather a coincidence? This is synchronicity, trust it and go with the flow.

Card 3 (The Hermit) : Your fears  »

You are frightened of being on your own and loneliness, and you simply don't know quite what to do. Take time to relax and in time you will have the answers. The Hermit signals a warning not to make hasty decisions, so try not to get too stressed, and if you have been unwell this is a time for rest and recuperation.

Card 4 (The Lovers) : What is going for you  »

New love and commitment will enter your life, even if there's no one on the horizon - be prepared for a surprise. Throw caution to the wind and expect joyous and happy times ahead.

Card 5 (Judgment) : What is going against you  »

If you allow fear to stop you from taking a chance or a new possibility then you will lose out. Do not ignore the new opportunities being presented to you - a decision, new job or relationship could change your life for the better. Do not refuse change when change at this time is vital - feel the fear and do it anyway. Outcomes may well be delayed, however this is a time for positive action and not passiveness.

Card 6 (The High Priestess) : Outcome  »

Your intuitive powers are at their height at this moment in time; only by listening carefully and trusting them completely can you embrace that power. Do this and you will make strong, clear, self-assured decisions. Allow for flexibility and expect promising outcomes.

 |

Sunday Blah, Blah, Bleh, Bleh, Blues

Ten Reasons to Live:  (Alphabetical, not actual, as Faulkner would not be penultimate).

Bakelite.
Cashmere.
Cats.
Daughter.
Henry James.
Rhinestones.
Son.
Tea and honey.
William Faulkner.
Wimbledon.

One Reason Against:

I miss love.  Sex for me is causal, not casual, which is why I have only slept with a handful (okay, a handful plus a couple of digits) of men in my lifetime.  And for me, it's always men, especially brunettes with glasses.  Bonus points if they're artists.

Whenever I try fun, I end up sad or married or, in the case of my first husband, both.  Or in the case of my second husband, blissful, faithful, fat, and sassy.  

I do miss Married Pamela.  She was a lot less healthy, but she was so much more joyful.

As consolation, though, there's poetry, and because my friend CHET WEISE is the greatest charmer in history, there is this.  I'm one of the afternoon readers, and I'm also reading at the after party.  How cool is this, to read at a candy factory!  I'm taking my long-ass James Dickey poem there.  Maybe the South won't rise and hang me, in effigy or otherwise.  My imaginary friend Butch is coming to take photos.  I have two perfect dresses, well actually three--one grey, one black and tan, and one red, which I always forget.  Which should I wear?

Share |

A Feather in My Cap: Panache

One of the meanings of panache is "the feathers that adorn or comprise a hat."  Here's a panache for you, and here also can be found a poem with the word panache.

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
by Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry at daylight or before, In the early March wind. The sun was rising at six, No longer a battered panache above snow . . . It would have been outside. It was not from the vast ventriloquism Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . . The sun was coming from outside. That scrawny cry—it was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality. _____

The more common definition of panache, personal style, is something which I find myself lacking lately, so earlier in the week, when I was feeling very down, I primped for a date I didn't have, and I took myself out to eat, and I held the door open for myself, and I drove myself home, and I walked myself to the porch, and then...well, I don't kiss and tell, especially since there was no one to kiss and nothing to tell...This is my new knowledge of reality:  One can smile and smile and be a villain, just like in The Duchess of Malfi, and Harmonium is my version of Handbook for Girl Scouts.

PS Dez, I miss you but not as much as I did last week and more than I will miss you tomorrow.

Share |

Retrieved from My Facebook Account

From Alice Oswald's Memorial (a retelling/reshaping of The Iliad)

Grief is black it is made of earth
It gets into the cracks in the eyes
It lodges its lump in the throat

______
SOME UNRELATED MUSINGS...

This is brilliant, brilliant work that Alice Oswald's doing here. I love it. It's not the same as Dante/Mary Jo Bang, or Sappho/Anne Carson. It reminds me of the Vietnam Memorial if I could see into it, from surname to story, from edge to elegy.

I have always thought of grief as grey...and mourning as black and white. Like the newspaper, like the magpie, like the letters of the alphabet glyphed on the pages of a journal, mourning as black spot, as black lung, as black wing of the blackest bird...

I find myself in mourning every morning; although I wake up glad to be alive, I'm not always glad. That's the conundrum isn't it? The curve in the nautilus; the opening frown of the parenthesis, the versus of the poetic line--from end to beginning to end again; the the (as Stevens puts it, in a widely divergent context). 

Tell me something truer than grief, than dirt. Tell me something about ash and bone. Tell me something about someone you'd die for, then tell me how you'd live when they don't. Would you tell his story for him? Would you sing her songs? |

Happy Pamela Poem--"Ornithology: Wild Canaries"

Blue Fifth Review--The Music Edition

"Ornithology:  Wild Canaries" is featured.  I'm so very pleased to have work in the world.

Believe it or not, it's a happy poem about bebop, Charlie Parker, Harvey Parker, and morning sickness in the Musical Ekphrasis issue of Blue Fifth Review.   Sam and Michelle are wonderful editors, and I'm very pleased to be a small part of such a fine group of writers and visual artists.

In other news, life goes on.  My California dreaming was a nice fling, but there were problems.  First of all, Italians and Russians have different temperaments.  One of us is passionate, moody, intense and a great kisser, and the other one lives in California and has vanity plates.  One of us wants more than anything to be famous, and the other one wants her own bed and her own garden and sunlight/starlight.  Who lives in California and blocks the view?  Who screens out the lights and the breezes in the evenings?  I'd much rather see the constellations than the stars at Graumann's Theatre.  

(After the Labor Day weekend, when I did learn so much about Dante and about what I do and don't want from a fling, I returned to Kentucky missing the crazy, passionate, possessive till it hurts Pretty Boy.  I understood him, and boy say howdy, as we say here in the Bluegrass State, the kissing was spectacular.  That's never going to be equaled).

Do you think, Dear Blogland, that I will ever fall in and fall in like with a normal person?  One who is intelligent and kind and also a good kisser?  One who likes me for my brain?

I wonder sometimes if I am not the 15 year old girl in this family.  That sounds just like an entry in a 1974 five-year-diary.  I still have mine, so maybe I should mine them for more details of my adolescent maunderings.


Share |

Back...in Black and Coral and Tan

Share |

So....I have been teaching and editing and traveling to Nashville and visiting California and having a passionate argument/affair with an insufferably opinionated Italian...and I have two great dresses and two great sets of classes to teach and the best new shoes on the planet. (These are my Venus shoes, because I felt like I could balance on the edge of a scalloped shell in them). 

I have enjoyed my time in the classroom and in California.  Now it's time to record it.

What's it like to come back to the page after a successful poetry reading, a job interview where you actually are offered a job for 2013 (more on that later), and a whirlwind affair in which you and your new black dress encounter the artiface and angst and awkward-look-at-me that is southern California? 

It's kind of good. 

It's kind of fun to be home. 

It's kind of fun to go. 

A crazy quilt of images wrapped around my shoulders:  Sangria and San Diego, the Star of India and the star-studded party where I met Julia's brother (who liked my accent), and a woman with the fakest of EEE breasts who hugged me to her cantilevered cleavage (and I bounced off like a kid from a trampoline).  Dante and discussion and movies and animation and animated discussion and anger and misunderstanding and airports and artichokes and avocados and archangels...

That new lover against that old heartbreak....breaking through those barriers. 

I'm awake now.  I miss Dez, I miss D'angelo, and I am ready to make Harvey proud by writing a novel.

I plan to stay awake. 

Dante Alighieri has it right, as he always does:  Ruppimi l'alto sonno nlla testa/Un greve tuono

(A heavy thunder broke the deep sleep in my head).

Before thunder, there is lightning..right?  I was struck, moved, changed by California.  I remembered why I loved San Francisco, why I both loved and hated San Diego, how pacific the Pacific really is, and how passionate the Atlantic really was...

I am ready to write a story that moves cross continent.  For that I'll need some mojo, some magic.

And these are my Mercury shoes...do you see that they are magic?