Bittersweet

Relics, lost and by the wind grieved, I'm saying

 

Salty Pepper Birds

Heather Ross Miller 

Winter white with glass doors,

drawer pulls and locks, built in

hard to the west kitchen wall. 

Two little gold birds lived there, 

salty pepper birds, the size of my thumbs, 

untouchables, my mama's best china stacked 

behind their wings, wine flagons to the front, 

little birds of paradise she got for marrying.

 

I crawled up and cut myself,

bloodying the plates, fisting

my little birds until they broke

before I fell.  Somebody pried

gold splinters from my skin,

little bloody bird pieces,

and I cried then

for all the things

I would lose in my life,

for birds and for blood,

and for the joy

of holding.

 

I am loving this site: Better Book Titles

Go there and have a blast! Definitely rude and not at all politically correct!

http://betterbooktitles.com/post/1036953506/inferno

betterbooktitles:

Dante: the Inferno

She's the best.

 

Now She Makes The Coffee

Heather Ross Miller 

My girl, fragile as rose petal, rises early,
curly cowlicks all over her head, makes
the coffee strong to indulge her old mama.
What did I want when I first held her,
both of us small in our swaddlings and so needy?
Anchor, I wanted anchor, something to hold
me as I held her.  I found it in her father,
and he held us there.

She grew, we got older than I ever knew
we'd get.  She kept the petal, the cowlicks,
and when he died, kept the anchor.
Outspread corolla, warm and fragrant,
she brings coffee, we giggle and confide,
this is my daughter, Drink it, she says,
before it gets cold.

 

I am still reading all of you near midnight, thank you. and a poem:

 

Bearing the Sunday Paper

by Kathryn Gessner

Born underground, my fears clutch
at my chest,
Egypt in the fire, uprising
beside the oil well --
Christ in Gethsemane.
You can call this a pagan ritual
or call it betrayal,
doesn't matter: the story
is one dark tale.  Nailed through hands
in front of friends.
Can you tell me how
to rest now after this?

The early hymns about the rugged cross
were my first songs.  I stood in Easter dress
and patent shoes frozen to the ground.
April dawn cold, below zero.
The sun would rise like the minister
said he would.

I have enough insurance and real estate.
A sensible car, low gas mileage.
The heart knows what miles per gallon does not.
Humanity is pumping in my own veins.

Coffee I pour could be unfair to harvesters
tilling above their own graves.  Hoping
for a better price.  Do I have to forget
all the others so I can eat?

If I accept the bread and wine today,
I will forget them as I eat.
I sip my coffee and stay home, wait
for Monday's first light.

 

the new year makes me remember things much missed

 

Clothings

Heather Ross Miller 

The soft brushed feel of often-washed fabrics,
little blue denims, red corduroys, wraps me
in a warm cocoon.  I am dressing grandsons
and they hold up their arms, push their heads,
sink legs through so eagerly, I suddenly, deeply,
long for their father telescoped back, a baby
on my lap.

Then even more suddenly, deeply, long myself
back to the old apartment kitchen where my mother
dresses me beside a wood stove, the fragrances
of kerosene and cedar, strawberry jam, dark coffee
blooming its little glass top, her Maxwell House,
Good to the last drop!

Oh, for anything good to the last drop, to dress myself
and my grandsons in the clothings of such comfort,
such love with no apology, oh, abide.

 

falling in love again, again, so, just sayin'

 

What We Liked

Heather Ross Miller 

You made coffee so strong, it stood up
and swaggered off, licking the spoon,
and I liked that.  So I made spaghetti so
rich in my black iron dutch oven, it got
bigger and better each day, like chewing
a cow's tongue, you'd say, grinning,
except I never fed you a cow's tongue,
you just said it, just said it.

So we liked what had a real presence,
something that took up space and held it.
Like the two children, who came three
Septembers apart nearly to the day.

And this was the presence we had, the
space we held, deep in the woods, pine
cones and acorns, occasional breath
of honeysuckle.

 

Neat Project: 7 Rings: An Artist’s Game of Telephone

I found this on Huffington Post, but it is on the artists' blog as well. Check this out. I don't know that I could do it, but it is fun to think about.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-campbell-and-nicole-walker/7-days-7-artists-7-rings_b_666403.html

7 Days 7 Artists 7 Rings

Or see it here:

http://bekandnik.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/11/

7 Rings: An Artist’s Game of Telephone

7 Days, 7 Artists, 7 Rings, is a living, responsive work of art created by Rebecca Campbell and Nicole Walker. Each week the painter and poet, respectively, alternate kicking off the current week’s collaborative artist project. Painters and poets, photographers and essayists, musicians and story writers will collaborate to create ongoing, live-made art. The responses will come daily, with artists having only twenty-four hours to respond to each others’ work. Click here to learn more about this project, the creators and participating artists.

. . .

A Painter and a Poet Walk into a Bar...

The transformation and institutionalization of the art world over the last few decades, to be sure, is hardly different. Many artists I know, including myself, have awoken hungover on its well-manicured lawn, littered with Murakamis and MFAs, tended and fertilized by the pre-recession boom. There we go, herded from exhibition to exhibition to museum show, onward and upward as we climb the ladder toward art world heaven.

So it is with a particular thrill that I introduce a new kind of exhibition-- a game called "7 Rings", exclusive to the Huffington Post, conjured by painter Rebecca Campbell and poet Nicole Walker. Each week the painter and the poet will create a work of art to begin the game. Each week they'll then invite 5 more artists from a variety of disciplines --writers, artists, musicians, etc.-- to join the conversation by making a work in turn, just as in a game of telephone. Artists will have 24 hours to respond to a previous artist's work or "Ring". Everyday on the arts page, you will see a new work of art branded as 7 rings.

[...]

National Poetry Day October 7

OK, this is just a goofy thing, but they say poets are neo-Luddites, and I always like to find things that prove that wrong. I got this note today from a group I've been affiliated with for a while, called Future of the Book (futureofthebook.org/blog is the more interesting start page).

It really only applies to people who play on Twitter (which I do), so if you aren't into Twitter, no worries. My own play in Twitter is on many levels, but there is bleed-over on all of them.

It's the constraint of playing with only 140 characters that appeals to both the poet and the journalistic headline writer in me. During my time at CNN Headline News, for two and a half years, I wrote the 128-character "headline ticker" on the afternoon shift, basically with the job to read everything in the world and generate about 200 headlines a day that rotated in a "wheel"-- while also cycling in and out of breaking news. So, being a perverse type, I also used to entertain myself by writing some headlines in iambic lines, embedding literary allusions or puns, etc.

Through some really rough breaking news days (I worked there from 9/11 through the tsunami), and even on some ordinary days, I came to see any day's tickers as a collaborative "Poem of the Day," and I started saving them as records of historic days, or just various "day-poems." Those of us who worked the ticker had a running contest for non-breaking news days, for the most clever or punny headlines, so I saved those too. It really was all too too much fun to be had as a grown-up, except for days when my dyslexia would reverse sports scores. 

Some folks in Arkansas even noticed when I put Jim Whitehead's obituary on the ticker (obits were common ticker items, so I wasn't doing anything that would get me in trouble). Slugged it "Poet of the Local Man."

Anyway, here's a Twitter thing, for those who want to play!

Subject: A Poem for National Poetry Day

For a few days either side of National Poetry Day, October7th, if:book london’s Director Chris Meade and if:book associate Kati Rynne will be gathering in tweets, emails and posts and shaping them into a very special poem on the theme of home for the digital age.

Entitled HOMEPAGES, the opening line of the poem has been supplied by award winning poet and poet-in-residence, Daljit Nagra.

For those on Twitter, simply use the hashtag #homepages and follow @ifbook.

Daljit’s opening line is:

My sofa wobbled with laughter beneath me

What next? It's up to you!

log on here now and help write a poem for #poetrydayUK http://www.facebook.com/l/4c134j7F2HcZ1WdpZ2ezrOMtyLA;www.ifsoflo.ning.com or tweet us a poetic line about #homepages

Jean R. has arrived!

My blog is up to date as of yesterday: http://jeansblender.blogspot.com

My book is close to being published and available!

Today is the 30th anniversary of my ordination in the Presbyterian Church!

Does Poetry Matter? - A fun discussion we can take up here too

Link: Does Poetry Matter? - Paper Cuts Blog - NYTimes.com.

Fun discussion on the Paper Cuts blog at the NYTimes. I thought a few excerpts from here might provoke some thought and interesting discussion from our perspective on here.

Chris

Does Poetry Matter?

By GREGORY COWLES

Sometimes the planets align and you start seeing the same idea discussed by different people everywhere you look, as if your brain had stumbled late at night across a niche cable station broadcast by the universe itself. For me lately the show has been all about the relevance of poetry, as in: Is poetry relevant? Even among poets there seems to be a nervous consensus that it’s not.

Writing in the latest issue of Poetry magazine, for example, David Biespiel argues that “American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political and public life.” He suggests, a little hopefully and a little bitingly, that this decline in significance stems from a lack of political involvement. “The poet who engages democratic dialogue and political life is the renegade,” he writes, “while the one who lives on the margins, settles into tenured existence or remains committed to engaging only other like-minded types has aligned himself with something that in its best, purest and most satisfying form is bourgeois comfort.”

Steeping in McLuhan...

You shoulda known I was never orthodox! He's so incorrect. Love him, lovehimlovehimlovehim. Not the aphorisms, either. Pooh on those. I want to find a copy of The Mechanical Bride! (written in 1948)

So decided to post this, since I'm back obsessing on figure/ground, which was once the title of this poem.

  

Vases / Faces

By Chris Boese

The dog rests her white chin
between bleached rails of porch,
white stripe on her nose splits
the black mask of her face.
She watches the dark,
the steady drip from trees
after a late summer storm.
Three candles give light
to smoke trails of incense,
an irregular cursive script
written on the night. The white
pot steeps black tea. Sipping
from my cup, I open a new page
in an unlined notebook.

  

Auntie Em's Dark Loves

Anna Smith threw down the challenge on Facebook, since Heather claimed Emily Dickinson had mean love poems as sharp as Edna St. Vincent Millay. (Of course she is right, but as she elaborated, Auntie Em was more dark than mean, but seriously arch-- and seriously sexy, but that's a theme for another day).

So never to let a good excuse to talk about Dickinson pass me by, here are a few that just randomly popped into my head whilst in the shower this morning. I'll drop some below the jump, in order not to take up too much space.

BTW, Wikipedia has this most wonderful index to many poems in T. Johnson's numbering system of E.D.'s poems, if you ever need to look them up. And to think I spent all that time transcribing. Wouldn't have to do that anymore. Johnson is evil, tho, for putting a 1955 or so copyright on work that rightfully belongs in the public domain. Bah!

Link: List of Emily Dickinson poems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Chris

  

640

By Emily Dickinson

I cannot live with You —
It would be Life —
And Life is over there —
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to —
Putting up
Our Life — His Porcelain —
Like a Cup —

Discarded of the Housewife —
Quaint — or Broke —
A newer Sevres pleases —
Old Ones crack —

I could not die — with You —
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down —
You — could not —

And I — Could I stand by
And see You — freeze —
Without my Right of Frost —
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise — with You —
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus' —
That New Grace

Glow plain — and foreign
On my homesick Eye —
Except that You than He
Shone closer by —

They'd judge Us — How —
For You — served Heaven — You know,
Or sought to —
I could not —

Because You saturated Sight —
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be —
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame —

And were You — saved —
And I — condemned to be
Where You were not —
That self — were Hell to Me —

So We must meet apart —
You there — I — here —
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are — and Prayer —
And that White Sustenance —
Despair —

Neat story about Natalie Merchant putting Victorian poetry to music

Link: Natalie Merchant: Globe-Spanning Poetry : NPR.

You must listen to this segment from this morning on NPR!

Besides her wonderful voice and music (several selections are played), her stories behind why she picked the poems she did are really touching and poignant, especially the one behind Hopkins' "Spring and Fall," one of my favorite poems ever.

I love the phrasing and music she puts with "Spring and Fall" also.

Album is just out today.

Natalie Merchant: Globe-Spanning Poetry

Photo by Mark Seliger   Natalie Merchant's new album, Leave Your Sleep, sets poems to music from around the world.

For her first new studio album since 2003, Natalie Merchant decided to adopt a new approach to songwriting: On Leave Your Sleep, the singer has set to music the poems of writers representing different nationalities and time periods. In keeping with this diverse array of lyrical source material, the music on Leave Your Sleep spans genres from around the globe, including jazz, bluegrass, reggae, chamber music and Balkan, Chinese and Celtic folk.

[...]

Another of the authors called upon by Merchant for Leave Your Sleep is Nathalia Crane, who began her career as a child prodigy. In 1922, when Crane was only 9, the New York newspaper The Sun published her first collection of poems, The Janitor's Boy. For the song of the same name, Merchant wanted to capture the spirit of the times during which Crane became an overnight sensation. She enlisted the help of Wynton Marsalis, who collaborated with her in writing and arranging the song, a traditional Dixieland jazz number. He also brought in his Wynton Marsalis Quintet to record the song.

Coffee seems to appear everywhere

I couldn't help thinking about coffee when it was mentioned so much.  So I wrote this sappy coffee poem for my true love:

The Waiter Brings His Coffee

Kathryn Gessner

Mornings in Montserrat at the abbey café
I tried to order him café con leche,
but when I stood next to my man,
always the Spaniards turned to let
him speak, repeating my words
in corrected tones.

I heard how good his Spanish was.
I watched waiters lean into his words,
their actions immediately shaped by sound,
though he claims no fluency.
Language made him one with them.
I knew I could study a long time
never earning that sacred trust.

An unspeakable nuance in delivery
smooth edges like ocean glass
the sound of his first year in Ecuador,
a Spanish spoken as in Spain.

San Diego man, growing up surrounded
by pop culture bilingo, still he spoke
continental Spanish.  I could hear it.

Like the language of his fingers
on the strings, improvised space
and rhythm, ease and breath,

Open tuning to a cup of warmth
a cathedral carved in style.

Break a few more eggs. Make an omelette.

 

Breakfasting

Heather Ross Miller

She broke the eggs, added the cheese
and peppers to make the spicy omelette
her daughter loved. And sang to herself
the songs women sing for daughters
they love: I want the blue bowl, the stove,
the window opening to these fields,
to be hers. I want a baby on her hip,
and upstairs a man who comes down
to drink the coffee she makes.
She pours the cup. He takes it,
and in that quiet but stunning moment,
all the pleasures of the world
flourish between them.

The baby stirs, holds out a sticky
little thumb. The man kisses the
thumb, kisses my daughter, and
then the perfect three of them
become everything I love.

 

For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you

From Roger Ebert's Twitter Stream:

"For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you." Walt Whitman died this day in 1892. http://j.mp/9X02rk

Or rather, this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjMoRb5f-EQ

But WHY didn't he stay in Brooklyn? I mean, Camden, NJ? (I live in Walt Whitman's Brooklyn, and I lean and loaf with his leaves of grass every time I walk my dog through the park he helped create, just blocks from his two homes in this area-- and not far from the Navy Yards, where he picked up sailors, and picked bones of Revolutionary War dead dumped overboard from the British prison ships in the East River.)

Link: YouTube - SpokenVerse's Channel.

What we've been talking about...

There's a fun site called Wordle that lets you put in Feed URLs (or paste documents, or Delicious usernames) and it will generate an image based on word-use frequency. Since our tag cloud isn't working the way I want it to (give me time, give me time!), I thought I'd generate an image from THIS site feed, from a moment in time, today, to make a found poem of sorts out of all the stuff we've been posting! 

Feel free to go to Wordle and play with it. It's a lot of fun. Click on the image below to enlarge for easier reading.

Too good not to share...

Typography

A Poem by Taylor Mali. Animation by Ronnie Bruce (animation project for a class).

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

For those with an interest in literature for young people

Link: Education Week: The Case for Literature.

A friend, Tracy Gardner, tweets as @newsfromtengrrl  or http://twitter.com/newsfromtengrrl. She works at NCTE, or did last time I checked, and tends to post link pointers to things many of us care about.

Today she had a pointer to this article, and it had some neat bits that related to a side conversation in the comments on one of the poems in here (for those of us who took Heather's Kiddie Lit class in Arkansas, or have a strong interest), so I thought I'd share.

Published in Print: February 10, 2010, as The Case for Literature

Commentary

The Case for Literature

By Nancie Atwell

A few weeks ago, I received an urgent e-mail: The National Council of Teachers of English is looking for volunteers for an ad hoc task force whose charge is to gather evidence about why literature should continue to be taught in the 21st century.

Apparently, the worth of book reading had become an issue among the work groups that, behind closed doors, were writing the K-12 “common-core standards” that promise to shape curriculum in U.S. classrooms. Given that the Common Core State Standards Initiative is dominated by test-makers and politicians—representatives from the College Board, ACT, Achieve, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association—I was dismayed, but not surprised, that the NCTE was finding it necessary to lobby on behalf of literature.

One more note about Flash

I want to add one more note about the flash: I don't think it a good exercise for beginning creative writers, maybe not even an advanced workshop. Bill Harrison used to say novice fiction writers need to expand, to open, not retreat, or go inside. They need the wiggle room in which to develop a story and a character. Only later are they ready to shave away at the big rock. Now I will shut up on this, post no more. Thanks for your patience and your interest. And let me read something of yours!

The day of his death was a dark cold day

From an apt Twitter reminder from Roger Ebert (who has a wonderful and twisted Twitter style)

He writes:

RT @ebertchicago: W. B. Yeats could not find the falconer this day in 1939.   http://j.mp/dAkarS

William Butler Yeats - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. William Butler Yeats (pronounced /ˈjeɪts/; 13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)

YouTube - SpokenVerse's Channel: A reading of Auden's elegy for W.B. Yeats, who died 1939, just before WWII.

"In Memory of W. B. Yeats" by W.H. Auden

From: SpokenVerse | August 11, 2008 | 2,700 views

J.D. Salinger dies

Just felt like marking his passing. Heather, you were the one who got me reading his other stuff, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Frannie and Zoey.

Link: Farewell, J. D. Salinger - Paper Cuts Blog - NYTimes.com.

This article has a neat quotation:

There will no doubt be a lot of tributes and appreciations to Salinger in the coming days — a notion that would surely have driven Salinger himself crazy. Here’s Holden, cranky as ever:

Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.

[...]

We’ve missed J. D. Salinger for a long time, but now we can bid him farewell and wish him peace.

Link: J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author of The Catcher in the Rye, Dies at 91 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com.

This the official obit, the one the NYTimes morgue has probably had written in a file for years. They've had a bit of time to polish it.

UPS Man and Susan's poem

I started to read Susan's poem while the chicken was in the oven.  Right in the middle of the levees, the doorbell, the dog's sharp bark.  I opened the door to watch the truck drive down the street in the dark, let the damp of new snowfall in the mountains come in with the two books I ordered, "Here, Bullet," by Brian Turner, and "The Wisdom of the Last Farmer," by David Mas Masumoto.  A California veteran and a California farmer.  I sat down to read first lines while the chicken crackled, and I opened the Fat Bastard Pinot Noir (read: cheap) and thought about Susan's poem.  The lines that I read were these: "Peaches and nectarines are blooming, and grapevines are pushing out pale green buds with miniature bunches of grapes" (Masumoto 3); and "A murder of crows looks on in silence" (Turner, "Body Bags," 14).  The phone rang.  An offer from a man to refinance my credit cards at a lower rate, consolidate my debt.  Lordie, I should pick up the receiver.  I pick up the glass of wine instead.

Yet everything in my world is tempered glass compared to this poem of Susan's.  I read on through the antisentimental poem "Body Bags" by Turner to the very last line: "Last call, motherfucker.  Last call."  He writes it in italics.  As a line, it's not much, but as an Iraq war veteran's sentiment, it's everything.

I am remembering how peaceful it was in our workshop room in the afternoons in Fayetteville in Kimpel Hall, the reflected sun on the mountains making the cross on Mt. Sequoia glow just a little bit more than it should have.  I'm thinking that Susan could edit some of the journalism a little, intensify some of the coke, some of the fear.  Yet the poem seems true as it is, too, and these days, I can only say it is sentiment enough, but maybe it could use a little more darkness.  I ate a whole container of arugula greens on my first read through Susan's poem, and I wanted to taste the bitter turnip greens. 

I am going to read it again.  And I am going to post a poem here, a draft, that I hope you will all comment on, too, that I was afraid to post at first because it is so dark.  Here is the poem:

  

Reasons to Get Well

for Ric

Death by alcohol is the noisy way to go

taking the whole family down with the wreck

a swath of unfinished business floating there

on the surface for everyone to see –

ambergris, upholstery spanked with wine,

base element for all manner of perfume

scented throughout the house let’s not

forget the family

lurid in their cups, how they suffer

drowning in the wake, seeking out

a mate at the local suds-n-brew

their laundry spinning while popcorn

pool and television come in free.

Recovery is a funny word here, like anyone

can just get over it.  Remember?

Father in his bloodied sheets, damn crazy,

asking why we have to leave now

his knuckles open on our faces

his anguished words like ballad lyrics

quarter time a heartbeat shy with

lucidity only just at the end –

Alcoholism should go like cancer, quiet

creepy, undisturbed, with a nice epitaph.

 

~Kathryn Gessner

A Provocation: Richard E. Miller: Worlds End, Worlds Begin: The Coming Apocalypse [for writing, for everything?]

Link: Worlds End, Worlds Begin: The Coming Apocalypse (by Richard E. Miller).

You've probably come across Richard E. Miller frequently enough in College English or the 3C's. I've always loved his College English essays because they reach across to Creative Writing from the land of Rhet/Comp. (One of my all-time favorites is from 1994 College English, "Fault Lines in the Contact Zone" See also his 2005 book, "Writing at the End of the World")

But this isn't a peer-reviewed journal piece. It's a blog post, on his personal blog, and some bits of it just jumped out at me, and I thought I'd excerpt some bits, as openers for possible discussion. I've trimmed out the bits that mostly just deal with pedagogy, in favor of some of the deeper questions he raises.

I think a lot about all of this stuff all the time, and it makes me crazy most days. Would be nice to circle back and talk about it with you, old friends and anyone else who would join in.

Some good books to savor

Some good books to savor deep in the chilly January night, also good to make you rise up and write your own. Dip into these: The Love of Stones by Tobias Hill; The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw; The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova. You'll know the book is good if it makes you want to write. At least that's how it works with me.

Invitation Redux

Come on, guys, out with the poems, the stories, the pearls of your exquisite wisdom. January needs a bit of color, like bright red. I finally got out in the garden yesterday and promptly stuck my thumb on a rose briar. Hence the poem. See how easy? How ordinary? How surprising?

An Invitation

Come on and put up your poems with mine, anything except sad clowns.