Blue Positive

The Lowly Milestone

2012-01-25T13:42:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about milestones today, how they used to be these hunks of rock to mark the distance in miles to a real place, but now there's no actual destination. We are not trying to get to Sydney, but instead marking an important event in history -- the first looping roller coaster, for instance, which appeared in 1840. Milestones made out of stone are rare, but milestones are everywhere and for always. Can you think of other words that have gone this route, from concrete to metaphor, fossilized words, as I think John Ciardi called them?

Cheap Wine & Poetry On the Horizon

2012-01-23T12:37:00.000-08:00

I got some grant money burning a hole in my pocket, so I decided to join up with Cheap Wine and Poetry to

Feed the Hungry!

Yep, that's right: you, me, all your friends, relatives, and their friends and relatives can help stock the shelves at Rainier Valley Food Bank, and in the process receive a FREE glass of delicious cheap wine at Richard Hugo House while listening to some fine poetry!

When: Thursday January 26, 2012, 7:00 PM

Where: Richard Hugo House

1634 11th Avenue

Seattle WA 98122

(206) 322-7030

Who: Greg Bem and Amber Flame,

plus Peter Pereira and Martha Silano, supported by Seattle 4Culture/Individual Artist Projects

It's true!

This is a Rainier Valley Food Bank Benefit Reading;

the first 30 people to bring a donated food item receive a free drink!

What to donate:

The food bank can always use donations of high protein, healthy foods, such as:

Canned chicken, tuna and salmon

Hearty meat soups and stews

Canned vegetables and fruits

Dry and canned beans (kidney, pinto, green, yellow, refried or black beans)

Peanut butter

Pasta and rice

Pancake and baking mixes

Oatmeal

Granola and energy bars

Dried fruits (raisins, dried cranberries, apricots, apples, et

Stop Alien Abductions: Wear a Thought Screen Helmet

2012-01-21T09:53:00.000-08:00

"Many abductees describe aliens as gray."

The Books I'm Reading; the Life I'm Leading

2012-01-20T18:09:00.000-08:00

Seeing/hearing Erika Meitner, Beth-Ann Fennelly, and Nicole Cooley read here in Seattle a couple of weeks ago was such a special treat. I've finished reading Fennelly's Unmentionables, and now I am reading Meitner's Ideal Cities. They are both fantastic books; I highly recommend them both.

I'm also reading Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet; I am a huge fan of Boland's poetry, and her prose is beautiful, too. If you are interested in Boland's development as a poet--a female, Irish poet--this is the book for you.

Reading, a little writing (not much), and playing in the snow: that's been my life the past week.

2012-01-12T16:37:00.000-08:00

Gemini Space Capsule, Air and Space Museum, The Smithsonian

Research Notes, "Ode to the Imagination," Little Office of the Immaculate Conception

I wanted to give students at University of Washington a window into my creative process along with a sampling of the poems I write. I decided to focus on poems about mysteries--both cosmic and quotidian in scope, and--24 hours before this presentation/reading-- I decided heck, why not create a Powerpoint?!

Never mind the fact I'd only put together one Powerpoint presentation in my life. Never mind that my son had the flu and most of my notebooks are in storage: no time like the present, I reasoned, to throw myself out there to the sharks.

I began by taking a bunch of snapshots of poem drafts/notes in some recent notebooks. Then I troved Google Images and my own iPhoto collection for pertinent images. And then I started in with uploading photos and text, plus creating bulleted lists.

I admit it was a very fun process (much more fun than lecturing on the comma splice or eviscerating--err, I mean explicating--someone else's poem), but one thing I forgot is that a bunch of slides does not a successful presentation make! Oops! Also, why did I think I would never lose my place, never forget which slide came next?

Dear audience, thanks for putting up with me while I surprised myself as slides I forgot were there appeared when I hit "return." I must have come off like either a 90-year old amnesiac or a 5-year old let loose with a Mac. Forgive me, please, dear students of UW!

Honestly, I did not intend to be quite so transparent with my nascent PP skills, but when else to find that out but before a crowd of 80 or 90 that I needed to practice a little more at home, perhaps rehearsing more than once with the son with the 100-degree fever before it went to 101 and morphed to a tummy ache/headache/flu!? Anyway, other than a few (I hope) minor techno glitches/surprised looks from the presenter as she tried and failed to synch what she was saying with what was on the screen, I was quite pleased with how it all went off.

Best of all, now that I've done a full-length (class hour) PP presentation, I am SOLD. It's the best way to convey information to a large group of students with varying degrees of interest or expertise on a given subject. I am already scheming with how I will continue to revise this presentation, adding music and YouTube film clips of such things as Alan Shepard hanging out in his rocket before take-off, and of course David Bowie's "Space Oddity" booming in the background, along with ELO's "Telephone Line."

Research Notes: "Ode to Imagination"

Thanks to professor and poet Richard Kenney and the University of Washington for inviting me to share my work with one of the best audiences ever! I promised if ever asked back to read/PP, I will wow you with my techno savvy, never once getting my slides out of order!

Open Books Reading: Cooley, Fennelly, & Meitner

2012-01-06T10:25:00.000-08:00

These three ladies rocked Seattle's Open Books last night!

Nicole Cooley read first from her book Breach and also a great new poem about dollhouses. I was taken with her poem "September Notebooks" right from the opening image from that book I read as a child about the porridge "that takes over the town." Morphing Katrina with 9/11: it works beautifully in this poem. Every word out of her mouth was incredibly powerful.

Then Beth Ann Fennelly blew me away with her reading of "Souvenir," which begins in humor and ends with incredible poignancy about our shared humanity. So good. And her poem about the painter Berthe Morisot was so inspiring. I read from Unmentionables last night until the book fell onto my sleeping face. Her poems just keep getting better and better. Here's a recording of her poem "Because People Ask What My Daughter Will Think of My Poems When She's 16." "When Did You Know You Wanted to Be a Writer?" made me laugh but also scared my mom jeans off. Sorry, but you have to buy the book to read that one.

Erika Meitner finished off the reading with her kick-ass poems, starting off with "Miracle Blanket," from her book ideal cities, which won the 2010 National Poetry Series. "Miracle Blanket" begins in humor and ends in supreme holiness--any poem with a saint in it rocks, but to pair the ridiculousness of the swaddling/shush-ing solution to a colicky infant and invoke the patron saint of babies made for a glorious coupling. I also loved learning about her process/hearing poems borne of combing the internet for the generic language of contracts/legal documents. And the poem about Wal-Mart, incantatory and spellbinding! Erika also has an even newer book from Anhinga, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls. Read a review in Barn Owl Review.

What a reading -- so inspiring. I can't wait to dive into their newest collections.

Respect the Vegans

2012-01-03T19:49:00.000-08:00

I often talk a big game about becoming vegan at some point in my life ... not today, not tomorrow, but maybe, I don't know, next year? Once I actually assumed A Vegan Life. It lasted about a month. I remember quite a few dinners consisting of fried potatoes with lemon tempeh. There was also the challenge of concocting dairy-free desserts (I think I gave up and resorted to chocolate sorbet most nights). I didn't drink much coffee back then, so half-and-half wasn't much in the picture, but how did I think I was going to survive without cheesecake, pumpkin pie, yogurt, or two eggs over easy? Or milk chocolate!?

Chocolate became my gateway back to fish, ice cream, and chicken (I had not, since 1979, eaten what I referred to as "red" meat--veal, beef, lamb, pork--though the fact that I did eat chicken and fish made me not quite the vegetarian I longed to be). Yes, chocolate, of course. Because I was hungry all the time (vegetables and rice just aren't that filling), I started nibbling this giant bar of gourmet chocolate I spotted in the pantry. More than nibbling. I was helpless. In one day I ate the entire bar. This created a great dilemma: what was I to call myself? A choco-vegan? After all, there was not yet a word for my kind of cheater: a flexitarian. There was no place to hide, no sorta vegan or quasi-vegan, so I chucked the whole meat/dairy-free thing in one fell swoop. The next morning it was eggs in the batter and cow's milk on the Cornflakes. Done, finito, exeunt.

Until yesterday. Yesterday and today I have been 100% vegan. I have not even attempted to eat with others or in a restaurant, and I am here to report that this is quite difficult diet to adhere to. I think it's mostly due to habits of taste, habits of preparation. I am used to having chocolate nearly every day of my life (and I don't especially like the dark version), cream in my coffee (actual cream, not non-dairy creamer, not soy or rice milk), and, well, milk on my oatmeal. I am not a huge carnivore, but it takes some amount of intentionality (is that a word?) to not choose a dinner menu that includes chicken or fish or dairy. It's something I don't give much thought to, though I do eat a diet high in fruits and veggies, and low in processed foods, huge hunks of charred flesh, burgers, fries, etc.

The diet I am on is drastic. I'm not eating any bread-related foods, or sugar, or distilled spirits, for instance. Maybe I could be a vegan most days if I could have one of these three vices now and then.

I will probably only last one more day on the 100% austerity diet--rice, beans, quinoa, fruits, veggies, and nuts. But I am considering going sugar, meat, spirits, and dairy-less for the month. No promises, but the thought has definitely entered my mind.

Any vegans out there who want to share their stories of conversion? Was it difficult at first? Why are you (or were you) vegan? Health reasons, animal rights, or some of each? Are you grossed out by all the yucky chemicals and harmful bacteria in meat and dairy products, even, in the case of meat, in the organically-labeled ones? Discuss among yourselves!

Hairshirt Redux

2012-01-02T14:34:00.001-08:00

If you're not sure which hairshirt I'm referring to, click here. That was last year, but this is this year, and this year I am, along with foregoing alcohol during hairshirt season, giving up all sugar, processed foods, and foods derived from animals.

Let the fun begin.

This morning I had oatmeal with raisins and walnuts, plus a smidgen of maple syrup. Not a bad way to start out the day, but I mourned the lack of half-and-half I usually douse my oatmeal with, along with the cream in my decaf coffee (since I can't drink the stuff black, I guess I'm also off the bean juice for the duration).

After finishing up breakfast I cooked up a giant pot of minestrone soup a la vegan. The hard parts about vegan minestrone are as follows: no grated parmesan cheese on top, no baguette on the side. Otherwise, not much different than usual.

I predict I will be eating nuts like a little fat-cheeked squirrel all this month. And lots of satsumas. Good thing I like both.

However, I have been craving Genoa salami all afternoon, and I wish I could have some of my homemade pizza tonight. I refuse to use soy cheese, and I do not think I am allowed to have any wheat. Spelt flour? It may well be worth a try at some desperate point during this month of austerity, but I am assuming it will not allow me to roll out a thin, crispy crust. Any confirmation on that?

I was about to head out for a jog, but--dang!--I hear the pitter-patter of raindrops. So sad!

It looks like I will have to sit here a while longer, attending to various and sundry writing and class prep tasks. Woe is me.

Happy new year, everyone! May you keep your resolutions for all time, or at least till mid-Feb.

Fire on Her Tongue!

2011-12-31T11:56:00.000-08:00

There were so many fine books of poetry released in 2011 that I really don't know where to begin.

Instead of attempting to choose my favorites, I am focusing instead on a book that became available yesterday. It's called Fire on Her Tongue, and it's an e-book anthology of contemporary women's poetry edited by Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy, two amazing poets in their own rite.

Amazon.com is selling Fire on Her Tongue for just $7.99, a steal beyond steal. It includes poetry by Patricia Smith, Natasha Saje, Dorianne Laux, and many, many other fine female American poets.

Buy it today for hours of reading pleasure in 2012.

Slate Magazine Poetry Podcasts on iTunes

2011-12-28T16:58:00.000-08:00

I came across this feature while searching around for food poems, one of my favorite pastimes. This one by Brenda Shaughnessy titled "Inappropriate Dreams" made me smile. Here's where all the podcasts live.

I love that Slate publishes not only poems, but audio versions of poems. Thanks, Slate!

Rattle Magazine: I Thank Thee

2011-12-14T08:36:00.000-08:00

This time of year as I spread Christmas cheer by filling stockings with high-fives for books and magazines that most float my boat, I turn to Rattle Magazine, the lovely little magazine that just keeps getting better. Today's poem by Canadian poet Julie Bruck is is no exception. Thanks to the editors of Rattle, and to Julie for waking my brain and my belly laugh this cold December morning:

Julie Bruck

LOVE TO BUT

Our very important neighbor’s
fused to his new Cingular headset:
Now he can talk and walk.
Blah-blah-blah goes Mr. de Broff.
This makes it hard to hear
even the packs of feral dogs
howling all night, or the cats
doing what they do in our dark
fog-bound city gardens.
The world needs its chemistry
checked, that’s for sure.
The poisoned river is high,
fast at this time of year.
Fences between houses are down,
and we all like our boundaries.
Pharmacies? Closed.
All essential services, shut.
Time to fetch my daughter
from a birthday party which
ended in 1963, but she runs late.
Sometimes, I have to pry her
from the door-jamb, carry
her to the car like a small,
warm totem pole with sneakers.
A yellow Hummer slipped
through a crack in our street
on Tuesday: not seen nor
heard from since, despite
the crowd of looky-lu’s,
still milling around out there.
Love to. But these are
strange times. I could
expire before I meet
you at the gate. Yessir.
Love to. Toothache.
Can’t.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Tribute to Canadian Poets

~ Book of Kells: Confession Tuesday - Looking Back

2011-12-13T21:22:00.000-08:00

~ Book of Kells: Confession Tuesday - Looking Back

Beginning again with horn, confetti, and tiara sounds good to me! I am glad that man saved you--I would not want a 2012 without you in this world. Have fun planning out your next year!

2011 Book Recommendations, Part 1: Prose

2011-12-11T08:32:00.001-08:00

2011 was a good year for many reasons, one being that my kids have reached an age that allows me to read more books, and not just poetry books.

Don't get me wrong, I love poetry books, but I do love non-fiction too, along with the occasional novel.

The non-poetry books I read with gusto and glee in 2011 include:

Mary Karr's Lit
Could not put it down. Sightseeing and AWP-ing in DC, I would pull it out and read a few pages every free chance I got. Riveting, harrowing, extremely well written.

Jim Harrison's True North
An epic coming-of-age tale in the great American tradition of Wallace Stegner and related he-men-folk with heart and soul. Memorable characters, expansive scenery, and lots of philosophical musings to keep you chewing.

Laura Redniss's Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fall-Out
I heard a review of this book on NPR in late 2010 and ran out and bought this; I've read it three times this year. Gorgeously luminous (literally and figuratively!). It's history; it's science; it's the heartbreaking romantic tale of two amazingly talented and productive individuals. Redniss deserves the National Book Award for this one (it's been nominated!).

Fritjof Capra's The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance
This book is worth it just for Leonardo's drawings, but I found the text fascinating as well -- learned a whole lot about Da Vinci's working habits, projects, set-backs, obsessions, and, of course, his genius.

Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
I've already raved about this book here -- I am so glad I had a chance to read it before it becomes a major motion picture in 2013.

Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
Biss drew me with the first page of the first essay. These essays force the reader to think hard about racism in America, past and present. I posted a review of this book here a few month's ago. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Joan Didion's Blue Nights
I've been a Didion devotee since 1979. Reading Didion is like visiting with someone I've known and loved since high school -- comforting, reassuring, right. This book is beyond page-turner; I read it with my eyes wide-open, forgetting to blink. "When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children." Indeed.

On My Wish List:

Eavan Boland's A Journey with Two Maps.
I was slow to warm up to Boland's work, but in the last year or so I've become a huge fan. She gets to this place in her best poems where she's almost speaking in tongues, comprehensible, but in fractured bits of image and pure emotion. Example, from her poem "Pomegranates":

If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.  
She will enter it.  As I have.
She will wake up.  She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips.  I will say nothing.

Stephen Greenblatt's Swerve: How the World Became Modern
I read an excerpt of this book in The New Yorker last summer, and I was blown away. Lucretius for the masses -- what could be better?

Tra la la la End of Year Poetry Book Recommendations

2011-12-06T11:33:00.001-08:00

Lately I have been very much involved in the great American rush to string the cranberries and popcorn (it is not easy as it sounds), bake the chocolate cookies (they must be crispy and chewy), stir the egg nog into the whiskey (goes down smooth but requires immediate one-hour high-intensity workout to offset epic caloric consumption), and all order of holiday merriment, but I have also been busy compiling lists of my favorite poetry book and lit mag reads of 2011, plus reading those of others.

While I put the final touches on my extended list of the books/mags I most fervently and heartily endorse, please turn your gaze to the fine recommendations by past and present contributors at The Kenyon Review, including yours truly.

While you are at it, have a gander at Jeannine Hall Gailey's bow-perfect list of her 2011 picks.

It's also a good time to cherish and patronize your favorite local bookstores; in Seattle that would be ... Third Place Books, Elliott Bay Book Company, and Open Books: A Poem Emporium.

All this good reading, eating, imbibing, and supporting of local businesses makes me feel so warm and cozy! Won't you join me in spreading good cheer by spending your holiday money allocation supporting writers and buying their books locally? Artists at places like Etsy appreciate your money, too, as do places like the National Audubon Society (Seward Park here in Seattle has a wonderful store). I'm not quite ready to give my friends the gift of charitable donations, but purchasing items from environmental/do-gooder organizations, including Goodwill Industries, is a great way to help out others and keep the landfills a tad less choked.

Inspired by Linda Bierds

2011-11-29T22:05:00.001-08:00

Flight

BY LINDA BIERDS

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic—

back from bone the echoes stroke, back

from the halved heart, the lungs

three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.

From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs

dangle, as back they come, sounds

a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.

The physician cocks his head and taps—exactly

as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock

chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved

and halved, until a roof appears, black as space.

I'm gaining ground, he says, the astronaut,

who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow,

a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown

above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself

and half again some metamorphic click,

extinct as memory. I'm gaining ground,

he says, and back it comes, his glint

of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light

or swaddled leaf, green in the season's infancy.

Source: Poetry (September 2006).

This is Not Black Friday

2011-11-26T07:30:00.001-08:00

I meant to post my poem "This is Not Black Friday" yesterday, or heck, Thursday night at 10 pm, but you know what? I have my own rituals around the day after Thanksgiving, and they have nothing to do with wearing the poet hat (not to mention the shopping hat). These include:

1. Staying in my pajamas & slippers till at least noon;

2. Having pumpkin/cream cheese pie for breakfast, turkey/stuffing leftovers for lunch, and eggplant parmesan for dinner;

3. Organizing my study, sorting through piles of clutter, etc. and [the best!]

4. Raking leaves.

This year I managed to attend to all four rituals. Because it was a cloudless, frosty morning, I donned my fur-lined sweatshirt over my PJs for an extra festive coziness.

I made my cup of decaf Tony's Carmelita extra strong and hot; it paired nicely with the pie.

Then I spent the morning transforming a small alcove in our sunroom/breakfast nook into my very own writer's studio. It's not much, but I have high hopes of purchasing one of those standing screens to create a psychological barrier between me and the kids crunching on their bowls of Panda Puffs. I also look forward to getting my books out of storage and putting a giant shelf to the right of me -- with all my favorites.

After a huge plate of turkey, stuffing, & cranberry, plus another schlive of pumpkin pie, I slid on my work gloves and headed to the backyard to tend to the millions of leaves that had blown into our yard during the 5-day wind/rainstorm. As I worked up a sweat I considered how a windstorm in the third week of November equals a record number of leaves in our tiny, mostly treeless yard. It reminded me of my years growing up on the east coast, where we had a mighty oak, a giant maple, and a substantial dogwood tree in our front yard--where raking, in other words, was serious business. Anyway, whatever the cause for all the leaves, it made for some great thinking/exercising time. As I toiled away I heard the not-far-enough-off sound of a leaf blower, it reminded me of Tacoma poet laureate William Kupinse's "A curse on leaf blowers and the men who love them,"and then it occurred to me that it's not so much the evil noise as the notion that someone would trade leaf-raking and its Zen-like calmness for a whining machine that can only raise one's stress levels. Replacing the rake with the leaf blower just doesn't make good sense for a nation in such bad physical and mental shape.

And what's up with the shopper-gone-mad pepper spraying? Or skipping the Thanksgiving meal to get a good place in line for the 10 pm Walmart opening? Excuse me for sounding off like a curmudgeon (RIP, Mickey Rooney), but I just don't get it.

This is Not Black Friday

This is lavender salt scrubFriday;
this is Buttermilk-Pancakes-in-the-Shapes-

of-Moons-and-Stars Friday.Nothing is black

on our 33-hundred blockexcept the hunkered-

down beetles, theneighbor’s slick-black roof,

and our roof, too, itswaterfall of rain.

Nothing’s been saved butthe leftover lo mein.

The value of the day is nota 5MP camera

with 2.4” LCD, but the eggcarton turkey centerpiece

with bottle cap and tinsel accents.Nothing rolled back

but the covers at 6 am, achild’s dada, you’re a wild thing,

the big deal made when sheasked how the bubble gum

made it across the road (on the bottom of the chicken’s foot!).

It’s a frolic-in-a-field-of-dead-weedsFriday; no one

we know has slashed a god-damnedthing.

2011-11-10T15:53:00.001-08:00

Where my poem research led me today ...

A Single Plate is not Butter

2011-11-07T21:53:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in my previous post that Ronk reminded me of Stein. But Stein, after all, is only Stein.

BREAKFAST.

A change, a final change includes potatoes. This is no authority for the abuse of cheese. What language can instruct any fellow.

A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all.

A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly.

An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations.

Anything that is decent, anything that is present, a calm and a cook and more singularly still a shelter, all these show the need of clamor. What is the custom, the custom is in the centre.

What is a loving tongue and pepper and more fish than there is when tears many tears are necessary. The tongue and the salmon, there is not salmon when brown is a color, there is salmon when there is no meaning to an early morning being pleasanter. There is no salmon, there are no tea-cups, there are the same kind of mushes as are used as stomachers by the eating hopes that makes eggs delicious. Drink is likely to stir a certain respect for an egg cup and more water melon than was ever eaten yesterday. Beer is neglected and cocoanut is famous. Coffee all coffee and a sample of soup all soup these are the choice of a baker. A white cup means a wedding. A wet cup means a vacation. A strong cup means an especial regulation. A single cup means a capital arrangement between the drawer and the place that is open.

Price a price is not in language, it is not in custom, it is not in praise.

A colored loss, why is there no leisure. If the persecution is so outrageous that nothing is solemn is there any occasion for persuasion.

A grey turn to a top and bottom, a silent pocketful of much heating, all the pliable succession of surrendering makes an ingenious joy.

A breeze in a jar and even then silence, a special anticipation in a rack, a gurgle a whole gurgle and more cheese than almost anything, is this an astonishment, does this incline more than the original division between a tray and a talking arrangement and even then a calling into another room gently with some chicken in any way.

A bent way that is a way to declare that the best is all together, a bent way shows no result, it shows a slight restraint, it shows a necessity for retraction.

Suspect a single buttered flower, suspect it certainly, suspect it and then glide, does that not alter a counting.

A hurt mended stick, a hurt mended cup, a hurt mended article of exceptional relaxation and annoyance, a hurt mended, hurt and mended is so necessary that no mistake is intended.

What is more likely than a roast, nothing really and yet it is never disappointed singularly.

A steady cake, any steady cake is perfect and not plain, any steady cake has a mounting reason and more than that it has singular crusts. A season of more is a season that is instead. A season of many is not more a season than most.

Take no remedy lightly, take no urging intently, take no separation leniently, beware of no lake and no larder.

Burden the cracked wet soaking sack heavily, burden it so that it is an institution in fright and in climate and in the best plan that there can be.

An ordinary color, a color is that strange mixture which makes, which does make which does not make a ripe juice, which does not make a mat.

A work which is a winding a real winding of the cloaking of a relaxing rescue. This which is so cool is not dusting, it is not dirtying in smelling, it could use white water, it could use more extraordinarily and in no solitude altogether. This which is so not winsome and not widened and really not so dipped as dainty and really dainty, very dainty, ordinarily, dainty, a dainty, not in that dainty and dainty. If the time is determined, if it is determined and there is reunion there is reunion with that then outline, then there is in that a piercing shutter, all of a piercing shouter, all of a quite weather, all of a withered exterior, all of that in most violent likely.

An excuse is not dreariness, a single plate is not butter, a single weight is not excitement, a solitary crumbling is not only martial.

A mixed protection, very mixed with the same actual intentional unstrangeness and riding, a single action caused necessarily is not more a sign than a minister.

Seat a knife near a cage and very near a decision and more nearly a timely working cat and scissors. Do this temporarily and make no more mistake in standing. Spread it all and arrange the white place, does this show in the house, does it not show in the green that is not necessary for that color, does it not even show in the explanation and singularly not at all stationary.

[Isn't this amazing? I mean, a breakfast is shiny; and a sudden slice does change the whole plate. Stein was a genius.]

Martha Ronk's Displeasures of the Table

2011-11-06T20:46:00.000-08:00

I had not heard of this book until poet Megan Snyder-Camp suggested I might enjoy it. She was right. I think I like it so much for two reasons: (1) it's about food and (2) it's not really about food. Oh, and (3) it reminds me of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, the section called Food.

I am giddy over Ronk's book and the size of it (it fits in a rather small purse). Here are a few excerpts:

From "Coca Cola":

Today it's hard to get anyone to go anywhere except the movies: dark, safe, sensual in an abstract sort of way, like coke. I know people who used to go everywhere, now watch TV every night. There is no city left, only threat and directions signs. "Stop," they say, or "go."

From "Oatmeal":

The most forgiving food is oatmeal. I eat it when I can't forgive myself or ones I most want to. Who do you think you are anyway, I think, who's going to make me, why should I? And why do I have to forgive someone for turning on me who can't think of how to keep anyone from turning angry of course the world is unjust and unfair. Peas Porridge cold and 9 days old.

From "Boiling Water":

What most people seem to like about food is what I find most taxing, metaphysically speaking. It is so transitory. One has to keep after it, keep bringing groceries into the kitchen, sorting through brown bags, going to markets, boiling the water, eating and then finding that it is time to eat again and then going to the refrigerator to get more and finding that one is out and also that there is no way to store up ahead of time so that you can keep on working and not get hungry.

Green Integer published Displeasures of the Table in 2001. Stay tuned for more excerpts.

The Pomegranate

2011-11-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Pomegranate
by Eavan Boland

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past white beams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

Eula Biss's No Man's Land: American Essays

2011-11-01T13:23:00.000-07:00

Last week I had the pleasure of picking up a book I could not put down, Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays. It is not surprising Biss's book won a National Book Critic's Circle Award in 2010; it is more than deserving of all kinds of praise and publicity. NPR calls it "personal yet dazzlingly eclectic," then goes on to say "Biss' pairings of ideas, like those of most original thinkers, have the knack of seeming brilliant and obvious at the same time." I heartily concur.

The book begins with the reminder that when telephones were first invented, people didn't actually want to use them. Despite this reluctance (and occasional outright distain), telephone poles began going up everywhere. And, what most history books don't tell you (which places us squarely in Biss territory) is that the erection of all these telephone poles allowed a new place to lynch black Americans. This pairing of a new communication invention with a uniquely American practice is exactly what Biss is best at: her forte among fortes is to make these brilliant couplings between events--for instance, Katrina and its aftermath vs. the aftermath of a small but significant tornado in Iowa City, Iowa.

She even has an essay about Laura Ingalls Wilder, which alone would incline this reader to grant Biss's book 5 stars.

The legacy of race in America is examined under a scope by a poet with an ear for the lyric quality of words; these essays are a delight to read because they please the brain, the heart, and the ear.

If you enjoy books that get to the heart of race relations (and racial misconceptions) in America today, this is the book for you.

Broadside of "The Poet is the Priest of the Invisible" Available from The Peasandcues Press

2011-10-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

About a year ago Joseph Green, a fine poet and also, with his wife Marquita, a broadside-creating wizard, asked if they might use one of my poems for a limited-edition broadside. Needless to say, I was very honored and excited by this invitation.

The hard part for me was coming up with a poem that was not only appropriately short (14 lines is about right; I didn't want Joe losing his eyesight typesetting a 30-line poem), but also one that I like enough to have it committed to a beautiful piece of art. In the end, I asked him if he would please use "The Poet is the Priest of the Invisible," a poem that appeared earlier this year in The Kenyon Review Online. Joe thought it a fine choice.

Joe and Marquita began working on my broadside this past summer. I received regular updates from them about the typesetting and artwork. When I learned the artwork was going to be a man's hand holding a lug wrench, I was particularly pleased.

Joe and Marquita live in Longview, WA, but Joe has a son living in Seattle, so I was lucky enough to visit with him and receive in person my twenty copies while we sipped sparkling pomegranate juice in my living room and talked about music, childrearing, future projects (including an accordion book of his pool poems, one of which I provided a link to above), and mushrooms, among other things.

If you'd like one of these limited-edition gems, you can order them for $25.00 each from The Peasandcues Press, 930 Cascade Drive, Longview, WA 98632. Joseph and Marquita can also be contacted at greens_tossed@yahoo.com.

My sincere gratitude goes out to Joseph & Marquita for offering this broadside at a reasonable price "because it deserves to be seen."

Congratulations to Eduardo Corral, Winner of a 2011 Whiting Award

2011-10-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

While you're patiently waiting for his first book, Border with Violin, to appear (it won the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets), you can read his online chapbook, The Border Triptych.

Bravo, Eduardo!! $50,000!! Not too shabby.

Apricot

2011-10-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

This one by way of Megan Snyder-Camp Lehman ...

Apricot

A summer Taos sunset in your hand.
The weight of a small child’s fist,
a girl, resisting sleepas she sleeps.
The shape of a chicken angel’s egg.
Eros’s lovely clefted backside
in velvet. Fleshy
as a horse’s lazy, lower lip.
A faraway fragrance:
juniper in gin, that slow gin
kiss.
What God saw on the eighth day, and ate, and said of it—
way good.The woody stone we worry-gnaw when death’s near,
when we’re toothless again as babies,
trying to keep a great thoughtsmall.

Deborah Slicer

Mid-Quarter with Avocados, Peaches, & Tomatoes ...

2011-10-20T09:30:00.000-07:00

It's the middle of the term where I teach at Bellevue College, so that means:

in my college composition class students are presenting in their Powerpoint slide shows about food poems such as Terrence Hayes' "The Avocado," Li-Young Lee's "From Blossoms," and Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the Tomato." The presentations have been amazing so far; they have taught me well how it pays to look deeply into a piece of writing and to grapple with how the images coalesce to make a thematic statement ... leaving the reader not only more informed on a subject (the abolitionist movement, for instance), but more able to forge connections between things as seemingly remote as an avocado and a slave, or a strawberry and the dark hands of the farm worker who picked that red fruit so you could eat it with your morning bowl of cereal.

I never cease to be amazed at how well they do on these poetry presentations. I wish I could invite the entire campus to come and see what they're up to--how successfully they bring these poems-on-the-page to life. Their slides are full of fresh peaches, beckoning strawberries, bright green apples. And their bulleted lists reflect the close reading they've done to get to the poem's heart.

It's so gratifying to watch and listen as they bring poetry to life, forging a silent thing into it a full-blown sensory experience, their voices (or the poet's) booming out with the words of the poem, then the images brought to life on the screen, and sometimes a chance to hold a pomegranate, or a mango, or a plantain in our hands as they explain its significance in their presented poem.

AND

this also means that in my Advanced Composition class my students are reading Michael Pollan's Food Rules, choosing a rule or cluster of related rules and writing a paper that either supports or refutes that rule. Paper topics include: the case for growing your own food (or buying it direct from a farmer), the case for eating an Asian or other traditional diet, the case for not eating foods that contain unpronounceable artificial ingredients.

It's a busy time, but also in many ways the sweet spot--mid-quarter--when we are starting to get to know each other, to feel more like a community than a bunch of disparate individuals sitting in a room together.

Let the chilly weather arrive--I will be cozy with a pile of essays about how to nourish and sustain ourselves as individuals, while also eating in a way that is just and sustaining for all.

Presenting January Gill O'Neil

2011-10-13T12:17:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to get to hear/meet poet January Gill O'Neil yesterday afternoon at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. Her first full-length collection, Underlife, appeared from CavanKerry Press in 2009, and was a finalist for both the Foreward and Patterson Poetry Prizes. Underlife is filled with poems at times sumptuous, risky, funny, playful, sexy, food-ful, and wise. Here's one to whet your appetite:

Nothing Fancy

I am from hush puppies & barbecue

from chitlins & fatbacks

hog maws & hog jaws & grits & scrapple.

Outside stands a dogwood tree we have let

overgrow from laziness

& a driveway cracked

with blades of grass.

I am from Rosemary & Stanley,

the last model in the series.

Around our house honeysuckle blesses the air,

seasons the heat of summer into a main dish.'

I am a plum black garnish to the day.

Wafts of smoke from pots on the stove

steam the kitchen.

Salt & Pepper stand at attention

next to the potholders on the counter.

Dinner is ready--no time for parsley.

At Long Last: A Little Office

2011-10-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

I am not sure I've ever shared this with my blog audience, but no time like the present:

I do not have an office.

That's right, you heard it here first.

What I have is a desk (I got it for free) next to my son's keyboard.

What i have is a small space in my bedroom, where my husband also has his study (aka our bed).

This is a photo of my study:

I pride myself on being able to write anywhere--in my car, on buses, in museums and cafes, during meetings, and waiting in line, but ... but ... since I've just turned 50 and I'm at work on a 4th book ... I think it's time to legitimize my profession as a writer.

Because my son is afraid of monsters, we have an empty room off the kitchen. Instead of hanging out/sleeping in there, he bunks with his sister in the tiny room near our bedroom. Yes, a spare room.

Where to start? My sister said "Google Home Office Design," so I did:

I don't think so.

This one's kinda cute.

Too stark.

Too modern.Too living-room.

Kinda nice!
This last one feels the most like me--I like the natural wicker, the hassock (though that might be a pipe dream--I need back support?), and there's something inviting about the white and natural browns.

Hmmmm...

I'm taking a trip to Goodwill this week to see what I can find used (wicker??). Then, where to: Ikea? Office Depot?

Stay tuned as The Little Office evolves.

File Under These Should be Illegal, or at Least a Controlled Substance

2011-10-09T21:27:00.000-07:00

These should not be legal. I repeat: anything this delicious, accessible, gooey and gloppy with fat and sugar, easy to swallow, and patently bad for you should not be available without a license, a prescription, or at least a note from your mother.

How could something so bad, bad, bad for you taste so good, good, good?

Because humans are programmed to LOVE, crave, and seek copious amounts of fat and sugar. Mrs. Paleo would have eaten these until she keeled over in glutted, glorious sugar-buzz bliss.

Who can blame her?

But Mrs. Paleo wouldn't have stumbled upon a Krispy Kreme tree or bush. She was too busy picking berries and hunting down mastodons. There were no Krispy Kreme stores in Paleo-Land.

Only we the lucky of the 21st century, only we get stuck having to resist Krispy Kremes day in and day out.

No fair.

Bravo, Bravo Tomas Transtromer

2011-10-07T13:28:00.000-07:00

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
translation by Patty Crane
Midwinter

A blue light
is streaming out from my clothes.
Midwinter.
Jingling tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a soundless world
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled over the border.

Apples

2011-10-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

Rain hazes a street cart's green umbrella
but not its apples, heaped in paper cartons,
dry under cling film. The apple man,

who shirrs his mouth as though eating tart fruit,
exhibits four like racehorses at auction:
Blacktwig, Holland, Crimson King, Salome.

I tried one and its cold grain jolted memory:
a hill where meager apples fell so bruised
that locals wondered why we scooped them up,

my friend and I, in matching navy blazers.
One bite and I heard her laughter toll,
free as school's out, her face flushed in late sun.

I asked the apple merchant for another,
jaunty as Cezanne's still-life reds and yellows,
having more life than stillness, telling us,

uncut, unpeeled, they are not for the feast
but for themselves, and building strength to fly
at any moment, leap from a skewed bowl,

whirl in the air, and roll off a tilted table.
Fruit-stand vendor, master of Northern Spies,
let a loose apple teach me how to spin

at random, burn in light and rave in shadows.
Bring me a Winesap like the one Eve tasted,
savored and shared, and asked for more.

No fool, she knew that beauty strikes just once,
hard, never in comfort. For that bitter fruit,
tasting of earth and song, I'd risk exile.

The air is bland here. I would forfeit mist
for hail, put on a robe of dandelions,
and run out, broken, to weep and curse — for joy.

--Grace Schulman

Salami

2011-09-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

Salami

Stomach of goat, crushed

sheep balls, soft full

pearls of pig eyes,

snout gristle, fresh earth,

worn iron of trotter, slate

of Zaragoza, dried cat heart,

cock claws. She grinds

them with one hand and

with the other fists

mountain thyme, basil,

paprika, and knobs of garlic.

And if a tooth of stink thistle

pulls blood from the round

blue marbled hand

all the better for

this ruby of Pamplona,

this bright jewel of Vich,

this stained crown

of Solsona, this

salami.

The daughter

of mismatched eyes,

36 year old infant smelling

of milk. Mama, she cries, mama,

but mama is gone,

and the old stone cutter

must wipe the drool

from her jumper. His puffed fingers

unbutton and point her

to toilet. Ten, twelve hours

a day, as long as the winter sun

hold up he rebuilds

the unvisited church

of San Martin. Cheep cheep

of the hammer high above

the town, sparrow cries

lost in the wind or lost

in the mind. At dusk he leans

to the coal dull wooden Virgin

and asks for blessings on

the slow one and peace

on his grizzled head, asks

finally and each night

for the forbidden, for

the knowledge of every

mysterious stone, and

the words go out on

the overwhelming incense

of salami.

A single crow

passed high over the house,

I wakened out of nightmare.

The winds had changed,

the Tremontana was tearing

out of the Holy Mountains

to meet the sea winds

in my yard, burning and

scaring the young pines.

The single poplar wailed

in terror. With salt,

with guilt, with the need

to die, the vestments

of my life flared, I

was on fire, a stranger

staggering through my house

butting walls and falling

over furniture, looking

for a way out. In the last room

where moonlight slanted

through a broken shutter

I found my smallest son

asleep or dead, floating

on a bed of colorless light.

When I leaned closer

I could smell the small breaths

going and coming, and each

bore its prayer for me,

the true and earthy prayer

of salami.

--Philip Levine. They Feed They Lion. Atheneum, 1972.

Eating Poetry

2011-09-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep. She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams. I am a new man. I snarl at her and bark. I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Happy Birthday, Shel Silverstein!

2011-09-24T22:56:00.000-07:00

Italian Food

Oh, how I love Italian food.

I eat it all the time,

Not just 'cause how good it tastes

But 'cause how good it rhymes.

Minestrone, cannelloni,

Macaroni, rigatoni,

Spaghettini, scallopini,

Escarole, braciole,

Insalata, cremolata, manicotti,

Marinara, carbonara,

Shrimp francese, Bolognese,

Ravioli, mostaccioli,

Mozzarella, tagliatelle,

Fried zucchini, rollatini,

Fettuccine, green linguine,

Tortellini, Tetrazzini,

Oops—I think I split my jeani.

--Shel Silverstein. Every Thing On It: Poems & Drawings. HarperCollins, 2011.

Blackberry Eating

2011-09-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

The bushes are pretty much picked clean by now, but that doesn't mean we can't still savor, at least in our imaginations, a fresh blackberry. Click on this link to read and listen to Galway Kinnell's poem Blackberry Eating.

Appetite

2011-09-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

Appetite

I eat these
wild red raspberries
still warm from the sun
and smelling faintly of jewelweed
in memory of my father

tucking the napkin
under his chin and bending
over an ironstone bowl
of the bright drupelets
awash in cream

my father
with the sigh of a man
who has seen all and been redeemed
said time after time
as he lifted his spoon

men kill for this.

--Maxine Kumin

(Thanks to Kevin Miller for suggesting I post this one.)

Eating the Bones

2011-09-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

Eating The Bones
by Ellen Bass

The women in my family
strip the succulent
flesh from broiled chicken,
scrape the drumstick clean;
bite off the cartilage chew the gristle,
crush the porous swelling
at the ends of each slender baton.
With strong molars
they split the tibia, sucking out
the dense marrow.
They use up love, they swallow
every dark grain,
so at the end there's nothing left,
a scant pile of splinters
on the empty white plate.

Cherries

2011-09-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

What might be universally beautiful is hard to imagine,

perhaps only the sunrise and sunset,

perhaps the moon. If on earth

it might be cherries,

loved by the fierce and tender, eaten

by birds and foxes, and what humans don't take

are claimed by little green worms.

It's the time of year everyone stops what they're doing to eat them.

Pits bundled in animal scat nestle between cobblestones.

For these few weeks they gleam in every tree

the whole world seems not only edible but delicious.

Is there a pleasure in the mind like this simple sugar,

cherry joy--the whole mouth involved in

plucking the fruit from the resistant stem,

tongue, teeth, and lips cooperating in slipping the sweet flesh

englobing the pit, wet, belly-beautiful

in the mouth able to

collect and hold two or three in one cheek before

spitting them out. Nothing is more true than the body

then, how it is made to consume pleasure, for pleasure

to pass right through. It's the mind that's

made to ponder it, to hold on. The mind of Japanese samurai

held the cherry as an emblem for the warrior, he who

breaks the skin and sheds the flesh and blood

to find the stone within.

I have watched the cherries turn from pale yellow to dark as olives

I have picked them straight from the tree, red and obvious from afar

but up close hiding between lush leaves, little clumps of them,

I used a ladder for what I could not reach

and for those even higher, I beat against the branches

until a cherry rain pelted down. I have picked up caved-in,

oozing rotten ones in search for the sturdy that have fallen.

And I have savored the brown rustle

that dissolves in the fingers reminding that each one was

a flower first, but that's all I want of

memory, I think, the distorting entrails of the mind.

Or so I resolve until I'm sated. Until I'm

staring into the night. Then I'm eager to pluck stars.

Jennifer Grotz, author of The Needle (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) and Cusp (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

The American Poetry Review

September/October 2011

Vol. 40, #5

Strawberries

2011-09-19T08:55:00.000-07:00

I bought my dad a case of strawberries

from a young man on the side of the road

whose skin was as dark as the earth

he worked on. I hand them to my father.

He sets the red fruit down on the table and stares.

He holds out his hands, wrinkled and calloused,

how they used to scoop up strawberries he says

how he used those hands to carry them home,

make licuados and salads. How we used to eat them

every day with sugar or chocolate or just plain.

How that might be the only thing we ate for dinner

or lunch or breakfast. He would steal them

and sell them door to door in the neighborhood

to buy tortillas and a gallon of milk.

How he watched the sun rise every morning

and watched it work its way across the sky

like him across the fields those first years in Oxnard.

He can't eat strawberries anymore

because the taste and smell just hurts too much.

David Campos

American Poetry Review, September/October 2011 (Volume 40/No. 5)

David Campos was born in Ventura, CA in 1984. He graduated from Fresno High School and continued his education through Fresno Community College before finishing with a degree in English at California State University at Fresno. He has worked as a cashier at a meat market, pizza delivery driver and now delivers medication for a pharmacy. His poem appears in In the Grove and The Packinghouse Review, among others.

Ms. Silano, Why Do You Teach English 101 with a Food Theme?

2011-09-15T13:19:00.000-07:00

1) Confession #1: I love food. I love to talk about it, I love to read/write about it, and I am a better instructor when I make it the chief focus in my college composition classes. I enjoy all types of cuisines, but my main criterion is that the food I eat contains fresh ingredients (sometimes just-picked from my tiny garden), and organically-raised/grown produce and animal products. Does this make me a food snob? I don't know--you tell me. I have the privilege of getting to buy produce in season (at least a few months of the year), and eating wholesome/fresh foods, but even if I were living in poverty I would make it a high priority to serve up home-cooked meals using inexpensive ingredients--legumes, low-cost dairy products, whole grains, and plenty of fresh or flash-frozen produce. I also forage wild foods whenever possible (including dandelion greens, blackberries, and stinging nettles) to provide high nutrition at a low price.

2) Topic Relevance: By 2030 there could be 65 million more obese adults in the United States than in 2010, according to the epidemiologist Dr. Y. Claire Wang and her colleagues at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

This would translate into 8 million more cases of diabetes, 6.8 million more cases of atherosclerotic heart disease and strok,e and more than 500,000 more cases of cancer. Covering these topics provides students with a bit of health sciences education in addition to improving composition skills.

If the current trend in the rise of obesity continues, three out of every four Americans will be overweight or obese by 2020.

In 2003, the healthcare cost for treating obesity and its related diseases was $75 billion. That amount is trending toward $140 billion a year by 2030.

For every five-point rise in body mass index, men face a 52 percent increase in the risk of esophageal cancer and a 24 percent increase in colon cancer, while women can expect a 59 percent rise in the risk of both endometrial and gallbladder cancer and a 12 percent rise in postmenopausal breast cancer.

Other obesity-related ailments that contribute to the loss of disability-free years and productivity include osteoarthritis, benign prostate disease, infertility, asthma, sleep apnea and birth defects, which are linked to maternal obesity.

2) More Relevance:

Many refer to the obesity epidemic as America's most pressing health problem.We may not always agree on why we are becoming a nation of overweight people, but a recent series of reports in The Lancet points to several factors: (1) We exercise less, a lot less; we are car-dependent and believe that low prices and convenience are king; (2) There are food vending machines stuffed with candy and soda, fast-food emporiums and shopping malls delivering up all order of high-calorie concoctions; (3) Billboards & TV commercials bombard us with enticing depictions of high-calorie, highly-processed foods; (4) We eat outside of the home, or eat “conveniently” all too often; (5) Substances that humans are evolutionarily programmed to crave, but that are found rarely in nature--sugar, salt and fat--are more readily available than ever in the form of Mountain Dew, Pepsi, Coke, Micky D's, KFC, Jack in the Box, Krispy Kreme donuts, etc.

3) Local & Global Poverty: According in an article on September 14, 2011, in The New York Times, in 2010, about 48 million people ages 18 to 64 did not work even one week out of the year, up from 45 million in 2009. It also states that currently 46.2 million Americans live in poverty, and that Black Americans experienced the highest poverty rate, at 27 percent, up from 25 percent in 2009, and Hispanics rose to 26 percent from 25 percent. (White Americans experienced a poverty rate of 9.9 percent). When people are out of work and trying to make ends meet, they look for inexpensive foods which often come in the form of refined carbohydrates containing simple sugars; it is these foods that are causing lifestyle diseases that look exactly like the diseases of first-world poverty.

Globally, half the world's children live in poverty (1 out of 2 billion). Unicef estimates that 22,000 children die every day because of it. They also die from lack of clean water; in fact, 1.8 children million die each year from diarrhea due to contaminated water. What does this have to do with us, our food consumption, the way we grow our food? Sometimes the gulf between the haves and the have-nots seems insurmountable and unbridgeable--I am not here to tell you that we can save the world by not eating meat. I am only hear to engage you in a conversation about food and the way it's processed (or not processed), marketed, & distributed. I don't have the answers--but maybe some of you do.

4) When we eat conveniently and inexpensively it also turns out that we harm not only our own bodies but the bodies of farm laborers. That's because farm laborers cannot be paid a living wage when Safeway charges .89 cents a pound for cabbage. Most farm laborers receive no health or retirement benefits. They may work 14 or more hours a day, earn far below the minimum wage, and be as young as twelve to work in the fields from sun up until sunset, picking your low-cost tomatoes and lettuce. Yes, that, right: a 12-year old likely picked the tomato that is now a pool of ketchup on that giant Big Mac you're about to bite into. Either that, or someone your father's age worked all day in a field loading 240 lb.-crates for something like $3/hour.

5) We not only harm other human beings, but many of our food choices harm farm animals and our environment. When a box of Rice Chex is trucked from Ohio to Washington, that translates into quite a bit of fossil fuels and tire usage. When tires start to break down, they release all kinds of nasty chemicals, including mercury and lead. Every time it rains, these chemicals wend their way down to Puget Sound. The salmon get to eat those yummy chemicals. Animals that are raised in CAFOs (Concentrated Area Feeding Operations) spew out a TON of manure (a cow produces 150 pounds of fecal matter per day); it gets into the water system and sickens people. Speaking of water, you need between 500-2,500 gallons to produce ONE pound of beef. If you live in the desert (as most of us in Western America do), this seems like a high price for eating steak.

6) I'm not here to depress you or make you feel guilty. This class is about raising awareness--pulling back the veil and seeing what's behind these labels, behind the glossy print ads and the aura of a corporate name or names. I encourage you to enjoy the food you like to eat--to celebrate the foods that solidify and confirm your cultural heritage and your identity--but to be prepared to get acquainted with food on a systems level--not only your personal relationship with it, but a more holistic approach. You might leave here all pumped up to grow your own food (if you can), or all fired up about how food corporations market their wares to you and your children. That's good--but you don't need to get all pumped up, become a vegan, or convert your dorm room into a greenhouse to get an A in this class.

6) What you need to do is delay the temptation to make up your mind today (or next week) about your opinion about our food system as it currently exists, as well as the possibilities for the future. As a citizen and a consumer, you deserve to know what's in your food, whether anything that's been added is good for you, and what the animals you are eating ate before they were slaughtered. You might not want to know, and in some ways I don't blame you. But in this class you are going to find out. And we are going to write (and in some cases talk) about it. Keep an open mind, do your best to withhold judgment, complete the reading/writing assignments, come to class ready to dive into the activities, and I will support you in every way I can with succeeding in this course.

Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat

2011-09-12T10:00:00.001-07:00

So many blessings have been given to us

During the first distribution of light, that we are

Admired in a thousand galaxies for our grief.

Don't expect us to appreciate creation or to

Avoid mistakes. Each of us is a latecomer

To the earth, picking up wood for the fire.

Every night another beam of light slips out

From the oyster's closed eye. So don't give up hope

That the door of mercy may still be open.

Seth and Shem, tell me, are you still grieving

Over the spark of light that descended with no

Defender near into the Egypt of Mary's womb?

It's hard to grasp how much generosity

Is involved in letting us go on breathing,

When we contribute nothing valuable but our grief.

Each of us deserves to be forgiven, if only for

Our persistence in keeping our small boat afloat

When so many have gone down in the storm.

--Robert Bly

Love Poem

2011-08-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

Love Poem -- Robert Bly

When we are in love, we love the grass,

and the barns and the lightpoles,

and the small main streets abandoned

all night.

Ambition

2011-08-29T22:28:00.000-07:00

Watering the Horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen in the horse’s mane!

--Robert Bly

Reading Terrance Hayes' Lighthead in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness

2011-08-04T08:11:00.000-07:00

And what a good choice it was to bring that incredible book into the wilderness! I sat on the side of a glistening lake reading poems such as "The Avocado" (definitely one to use in my Eng 101 Poetry Presentation Food Poem Assignment), and others (like "A Plate of Bones") that I love, love, love. How refreshing to read his wild and whimsical rhyming couplets. I am so excited to continue reading this book as I take off the month of August into the outback wilds to revitalize my inner being, heeding Ram Dass's advice to Be Here Now.

A quick tour around the web will get you started, but you should really pony up and buy Lighthead if you have a few dollars to spare:

Terrance Hayes reading on You Tube

Several Terrance Hayes poems, including audio at poets.org.

Snappy review at Verse Wisconsin. I concur that "The Golden Shovel" (where he pays homage to Gwendolyn Brooks and her poem "We Real Cool") and "Last Train to Africa" (Elizabeth Alexander-inspired) are two of my fav in the book (though I am only about 1/4 of the way through; I found myself re-reading each poem 10 or more times before moving on to the next).

Hayes is definitely in the tradition of being a poet who is part of the great conversation of poetry. He also has a refined sensibility for musicality and slant rhyme.

His poems rock.

And ....

he has a beautiful reading voice.

And...

he is tres, tres gorgeous (never a bad thing).

And, big, big and:

he is going to be reading for Seattle Arts & Lectures on December 8, 2011. How lucky can we Seattle-ites get?!?!

Mama Camp

2011-07-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

Monday was Pie Camp. Apple Pie Camp. After rolling out, baking, and eating an entire Braeburn and Granny Smith pie with vanilla ice cream, we went to the soaking wet playground and zipped along on the zip line swing until we were sweaty and ... soaking wet and cold. We were still wired, but we had to come inside. Dance party in the kitchen followed by mellow reading night.

Tuesday was Future of Flight Museum in Everett, WA Camp. We went inside the biggest building in the world, which the docent said could hold 800 hockey stadiums and ... and what was the other comparison? (Sorry, but we weren't allowed to carry pen and paper).

We also got to listen to a very loud power tool, which this dude was using to put together a section of the front of a 747. We also decided Dream Lifter and Dream Liner were too similar of names -- how would you ever tell them apart? Riley said they should just make it simple and call them both Dream Livers. Did you know they make over 340 737s a year at the Boeing plant in Renton? Did you know that exterior airplane paint can add over 800 pounds to the overall weight of a plane? Did you know that a jet engine is around 16 feet high? Did you know there's a place in the hangar called the Dreaming Production Integration Center?

Wednesday is Science Camp Day at the Pacific Science Center. I think we will see an IMAX movie and eat lots of greasy popcorn with too much fake butter on it.

We can spend $60 each day at Mama Camp... and it will still cost less than a week of Wilderness Awareness Camp, though we don't want to knock the pluses of a kids-in-camp week, when we are able to write poetry and prep for our fall classes. But then again, Mama camp is pretty dang sweet.

10 More Hot Tips from Poets & Scientists Who Know It: The Space Shuttle Shutdown Edition

2011-07-21T12:42:00.001-07:00

1) If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. (Sir Isaac Newton)

2) Don't insult your reader's intelligence. (Elizabeth Bishop)

AKA

3) For all of the history of grief, an empty doorway and a maple leaf (Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica.")

AKA

4) Let the images speak for themselves! (Jorie Graham)

5) No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. (Crusty Frost)

6) If it is a wild ride, it is a poem. (Also Mr. Frostbite)

7) When inspiration strikes, drop everything and get to it (Anne Sexton).

8) Put your ear down close to your soul, and listen hard. (Anne Sexton)

9) Revision is your most important task. (Ted Kooser)

10) So, you want to be a poet? Do you have about 70 years? (Robert Bly)

Bonus Tips Brought to You By My Favorite Barefoot Poet, David Graham:

Bonus Tip #1: Nothing is learned once that does not need learning again. (Donald Hall)

Bonus Tip #2: If Fame belonged to me, I could not escape her ... My barefoot rank is better. (Emily Dickinson)

Ten Hot Tips for Aspiring Poets

2011-07-19T10:12:00.000-07:00

Out of the mouths/books of famous poets ...

(1) Good writers borrow; great writers steal. (TS Eliot)

(2) Lie for the sake of assonance. (Donald Hall)

(3) Lower your standards. (William Stafford)

(4) Give yourself permission to write a very shitty first draft. (Stacey Luftig)

(5) Make word lists and use those words when you get stuck or blocked in the middle of writing a draft. (Kelli Russell Agodon)

(6) Poems are not about communicating; if you want to communicate, use the telephone. (Richard Hugo)

(7) Communication should be your #1 priority when composing and revising a poem. (Ted Kooser)

(8) You know absolutely no allegiance to the truth; if what really happened is not interesting, compelling, or musical, revise until it is all of these things and more. (Richard Hugo, summarized)

(9) Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing. (John Ashbery)

(10)

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

(W.S. Merwin's "Berryman")

Writing Workshop on Main Street

2011-07-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

We are always booked up, but we are especially busy in the summer. Not the usual kind of busy, but the busy that has to do with sunshine and ferries, berries and backpacks. But somehow or other Kelli Russell Agodon and I found a way to meet for breakfast and writing this gorgeously sunny summer day. It was a bit of a feat, but we found a table for two in the sun, and for 2-3 hours we ate oatmeal (Kelli) and eggs with fried potatoes (moi) and scribbled in our notebook or tapped away on our iPad. When the final timer chimed we were up three poems: a sonnet, a pantoum, and an anagrammer-generated poem. Three more than we had at 10 am.

I sailed off into very light traffic heading south on I-5, my notebook thick with possibility. Thanks, Kelli, for another great writing session--it is people like you who keep me believing the business of words is the best business out there.

Leaving Marquette, Dreaming of Marquette

2011-07-14T19:28:00.001-07:00

Russ & Carol's Madonna with assorted house paints and brushes.
Science 2: The Building Where I Taught (I loved that they put me in a science building)

The Gries Hall Fairy House

The NMU Library Mascot

My Love Affair with Michigan's Upper Peninsula

2011-07-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

I had my doubts about Michigan. I mean, it might be what I've heard people call the Third Coast, but could it ever be as cool as the West?

And anyway, it's east of the Mississippi, and I let the East go thirty years ago.

But love is never rational, is it?

I guess that explains why I can't get enough of Lake Superior--her facts and figures (maximum depth: 1,332 feet), her tributaries (the Pigeon, the Pic, the White--over 200 in all).

I guess that's why I didn't want to leave Ishpeming, wished I could have photographed every house, every bar.

Smitten, I think you would call it.

How Do you Spell Minutiae?

2011-07-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

Do you view them as trifling details

or precise and purposeful points?

Are they Blake's grain of sand,

or whether you dined on scrod

or sea bream last Friday night?

I thought minutiae meant trivial,

but it also refers to minute matters

of import, whether to employ

semi-colon or period, comma or dash.

The poet champions image over trodden

or trite: the bat that flits at the close

of eve, the outcry of the hunted hare.

And then there's the key to keeping

hold of a wonder-struck wit:

It was sea bream; I'm sure of it.

I'm on the Pavement Thinking About Political Poems

2011-07-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

What have you been up to lately? I've been looking at/thinking about visual art, reading about the life of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and enjoying the scent of two tiny beeswax candles--one in the shape of a pine cone, and the other in the shape of a bee hive. Am also revising poems that have to do with consumerism, conspicuous consumption, the cult of materialism, but also with war and other nasty things I didn't used to write about because I was too worried about lapsing into cliche and rhetoric.

Political poems, poems of social commentary, are not the easiest to write. Love poems, at least to me, are a cinch compared to writing about war or famine or ecological disaster--but I have been busily trying my best.

If you are thinking you'd like to move from writing about your pet chinchilla or the spider you found in the toilet this morning to something akin to a political poem, the best place to start is with Poetry Northwest's Spring/Summer 2008 issue, The Political Issue. Not only are there quite a few wonderful newer poems by the likes of Michael Heffernan, Heather McHugh, Kevin Young, and Mary Jo Salter, but there's a wonderful feature where they asked each contributor to share their favorite political poems. Brilliant move. That feature alone is worth twice the price of the magazine. If reading the poems in the issue, plus tracking down the poems by Yeats, CK Williams, John Ashbery, plus having a gander at Kristin Prevallet's Dear George Bush doesn't get you fired up to write your own political poem, try reading some poems by Muriel Rukeyser, Anna Ahkmatova, and Bob Hicok. His "Stop-Loss" is a great place to start.

A few tips as you begin drafting a political poem:

(1) I know it sounds like a cliche, but the personal really is political, at least to the extent that your personal take (your images, your voice and style, your anecdotes and experiences about a political event or a beef against your government) is way more engaging than hollow/generic rhetoric and rehashed rage. Tell it from your own point of view, not from what you've been told by someone or some history book, news program, or newspaper.

(2) Even though you might have a specific opinion about the war in Iraq or who should be the next president, don't go into the poem already knowing what you want to say or where you want your poem to end up. Eek, no. Instead, go forth with no clue where you will end. That Bob Frost guy was a self-aggrandizing duffer, but he got at least two things straight:

(a) "A poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom; and

(b) "If it is not a wild ride, it is not a poem.

The same holds true for political poems.

(3) Railing against the machine does not require chest-beating or grand and eloquent statements. You don't have to have answers or solutions. The best political poems open the can of boingy, purple and orange-striped Wonderama worms and leave it the audience to react, revile, and/or pass it on. You don't have to be The Great Solver, or The Great Resolver. Sharing a racist encounter in a poem (without even commenting on it, necessarily, though you might) is quite enough.

(4) Get ready to revise, revise, and revise some more. Prepare to meet thy soap-box detector. It is tough to decide if you've crossed the line into preachy fanaticism. If you are not sure, put the poem in a drawer for a while, then come back to it when you're a tad less fired up.

I could use some help with this last step myself--when the humor completely drains out of a poem, it's hard to know if I've gone too far-- if I've lost my audience, bummed everyone out with my downer sadness about the state of the union.

Political poems take longer to write than poems about your sweet grandma or the Ossobuco your loving partner prepared for you last night. They can take a year or more, and then some.

Be patient and don't give up; you'll get it right eventually.

Greetings from Marquette, Michigan

2011-07-07T18:54:00.001-07:00

I managed to lose my digital camera today (yes, it takes a special kind of person), so these are mere Google images, plus I am a (albeit content) wrung-out dishrag from 3 x 4 = 12 hours of poetry workshop leading these past three days, but I want to share my exuberance and gratitude for being in Marquette these eleven days as the guest poet at Northern Michigan University. It is indeed an honor. In my class I have had the pleasure of working with some of most personable, graceful, caring, and articulate students I've ever met. They are trying hard to be the best writers they can be, and it is infinitely gratifying to witness their growth. I am spoiled, and in a big way.

I also love Lake Superior and its pinkish-sand, so soft, the lake so vast I could almost be walking down a beach on Long Beach Island in New Jersey.

I also must share my just-this-moment realization that I am NOT in the mitten part of Michigan. Silly me, I did not consult a map until ... just now. Silly me, I did not realize that the U.P. was not part of the mitten. I really honestly did not know that the part of Michigan I am in is above Wisconsin, and should, essentially, BE Wisconsin. Or how quite close I am to Canada (the lake that touches the shore down the street is the same lake that has a shore, across the way, in Onatario--at least I think it's Ontario).

Yes, yes, another dingbat American, another poet without a map, another detail-wise and big- picture foolish kind of gal.

What I can't understand is how the flight from Minneapolis to Marquette took less than 40 minutes. That diesel engine must've been switched out with some heavy-duty rocket fuel!

Other than teaching, I've been cookin' up a mess o poems. Half a dozen in the hopper since I took off from Seattle on Monday, with many more ideas illuminating my future. Miles to go before I even think about taking a hike, but that's just my ambition speaking. Seriously, I need to hoof it to the store before I run out of Wheaties.

Peachy as all get out to be in Roethke's state, in Jim Harrison and Bob Hicok territory, in Susan Blackwell Ramsey's backyard, though (curses, curses) no direct flights from Kalamazoo to the U.P.

Susan Blackwell Ramsey, by the way, is the 2011 winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize! Whooty-hoot-hoot! One of my fav poets! Yay! Though it kills me I'm so close, and yet she's not here to catch the cork, etc., weep weep.

And now back to learning about ore boats and that beautiful brick-red lighthouse ... thanks for stopping by!

A Game of Cat & Bird

2011-06-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

I was hanging out in the kitchen, fussing over a batch of fresh kale with peanut sauce, when I heard this loud chirping, something akin to when you walk by the bird section of a pet store. It sounded like a whole covey of chatty avian creatures (or however one might refer to a group of passerines), but I was preoccupied with the peanuts, peanut butter, and peanut oil, so I just assumed the birds on the side of the house were extra chirpy this evening.

And then my cat filed in on cue, a totally freaked out and sputtering English sparrow preceding her by a few inches.

Batty, bat, bat, bat, indeed. The cat and the bird, the bird and the cat. Not my favorite sight to behold, which is why we put this very obnoxiously bell-loud collar on Nacho.

But bell be damned: our cat had managed to take down a youngster songster, a little sweet junk-bird.

Next thing I knew, Nacho had chased the sweet little sparrow under a table, and poor birdie had wedged herself between the wall and the back left table leg. And there the freaked and tweaked thing sat, perfectly still, perfectly peep-less.

Until I had the brilliant idea of snatching her up with a pair of tongs.

When I did, she fluttered into the next room, where I was able to again gently nab her between two rods of stainless steel and release her out a window.

To watch her fly away toward a tree unharmed completely made my day.

It's amazing to me how animals go about their business all around us--building nests, chomping away at our wooden home (we found a monstrous carpenter ant in our upstairs bedroom the other day, but neither my husband or I bothered to pick it up and toss it outside; we decided this was one of the many reasons we were made for each other), biting us in the night (spiders? fleas?), stealing the strawberries (squirrel thieves!), generally doing what they were put on this earth to do (including stalking and killing). All while I'm fluttering about not unlike a that sparrow in the kitchen, oblivious to the near-constant dramas not only in and around our home but out there in the cosmos.

The Life/The Writing Life

2011-06-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

My ten year old left for sleep-away camp on Saturday afternoon. Here we are right before he boarded the big school bus for two weeks in the woods. He was probably thinking to himself "dang, no screen for a long, long time," and what was going through my head? Lots of stuff. For instance, he lets me hold his hand/hug him in public when none of his friends are around, but when he's on the school playground with me he'll ask me to please leave right now. I've been a little bit sad since we said our goodbyes. Out of sorts. Not only is the house unusually quiet, but I keep having these moments where I think I need to pick him up from somewhere, or get him to his piano lesson or soccer practice.

And then I remember he's not here.

It's a bit disorienting. I've been programmed to fetch, and there's one less kid to fetch.

Pathetic, right?

I mean, here's my chance to write and relax, or clean out the garage, or take a load of old clothes to Goodwill, and instead I am ... noticing all the mommies with toddlers and preschoolers and...envying them. This kept happening yesterday when I took my six year old to the zoo (yes, I still have a six year old; I have no business being nostalgic about raising children!): we would pass by a family with little ones in tow, and I would look on mournfully, remembering the stroller days (Strollers? Am I serious!?).

I can't explain it, and I can't seem to shake it. As I was stirring a Moroccan chickpea stew this afternoon (see below), I wondered if it might be some sort of evolutionary/biological trick, this selective amnesia that instinctually lets slip away the mind-numblingly boring task of watching a small child or children. How am I so easily forgetting (it takes work to recall this next part of the sentence) those days where I checked my watch every minute as I built yet another tower of plastic yogurt containers, yet another Thomas the Tank Engine track, or pitched yet another wiffle ball?

Is it really true that from now on all my kids are going to hear from me is how much I miss pushing them in the baby jogger? I don't want to be one of those older moms who can only remember the good stuff--who forgets the tedium and pain and sacrifice of raising kids--but at the same time, what's most forefront in my mind after ten years of raising my son is how much joy I found (and continue to find) in watching him learn and grow.

Okay, now I'm going to go crawl up in a ball and cry me a river.

But actually, I won't cry even a little. I might be a little out of sorts, but I don't have it in me to wallow. There's a lawn to mow, after all, and then taking my daughter to the library.

Also, as my poet friend Barbara Crooker reminded me this morning, poems don't come from an easy life. Instead, as she wrote in her email,

poems are like coal--they need the intense pressure of an out-of-control daily life to be able to turn into diamonds. . . .

What I take from this is that sometimes it's important to feel the feelings (even the ones I'd rather not feel), and not write. To chop the veggies, stir the stew, to let life unfold in front of my wide, wide eyes.

To know that poems can be born from bad days, from unwanted feelings, too. They always do. And in the meantime, I know my son is canoeing, horseback riding, and all the other fun things one does at summer camp.

Kelli Russell Agodon's 2010 Release Wins ForeWord Prize

2011-06-26T17:29:00.000-07:00

Kelli Russell Agodon's highly acclaimed book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press 2010), just won the Gold in the 2011 ForeWord Prize. Congratulations, Kelli!

Here's me below, raising a well-deserved glass to one of my favorite poets. When I heard the news, the first image that popped into my head was a smiling-from-the-grave Emily Dickinson. The second was imagining the look on the face of that poor, misguided teacher who once told Kelli her poems weren't *actually* poems. More evidence to the contrary: I'll drink to that!

One Piece of Advice from Poetic Asides

2011-06-24T23:20:00.000-07:00

Robert Lee Brewer is featuring, on his blog Poetic Asides, bits of advice he's received from poets that he's interviewed over the years.

Thanks, Susan Rich, for reminding me about W.S. Merwin's "Berryman," especially the lines

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

And thanks, Dorianne Laux, for reminding me not to write sissy poems. (I think I know what those are.)

And thanks Jeannine Hall Gailey and Diane Lockward, for putting it so plainly: embrace your weirdness.

But most of all thanks to Robert, for asking ...

Ren Powell's Mercy: New & Selected Poems

2011-06-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've been reading and enjoying Ren Powell's, Mercy Island New & Selected Poems. These strange, entrancing and beautiful poems lead us into a world crawling with creatures--cicadas, rhesus monkeys, turtles, baboons, a looming red-eared slider--along with a compelling cast of human characters. These are borderless, luminous creations written by a poet of witness who leads us across continents and states of consciousness with an honesty that is both elusive and accessible. Powell's lens looks straight into the horror of violence and terror, but what she shares with her reader is the resounding reminder that the human spirit is resilient and abiding. These compassionate and truthful poems pull us in and refuse to let us go.

I was born again.

Then I was born again.

He said they found me in a crack

in a rock in the Valley of Fire.

Easter morning

I was a red-eared slider

Peace sign

painted on my shell.

I got a new name

driving through Utah,

obeying all the signs:

watching

for the “crazy escaped Indian”

called Falling Rock.

I was Love—loved

like a Susanna, whispered to sleep

by the elder’s soft, blubbering bong.

I was Love, loved

like the naked little angels of the temple

in Salt Lake City where Mamma said

they baptise the dead.

Don't Miss the Filter III Release Party!

2011-06-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

Filter Vol. III: HOT OFF THE PRESSES!

The Filter Vol. III Release Party will be: Friday, June 17^th,8p.m.at the Fremont Abbey, 4272 Fremont Ave North, Seattle, WA 98103

An evening of readings from Zachary Schomburg, John Osebold, Stacey Levine, Maged Zaher, Karen Finneyfrock, Ed Skoog, Elizabeth Colen, Elissa Washuta, Susan Rich and Sarah Bartlett . Freshly letterpressed copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Filter Vol. III has arrived. This 3^rd issue of the entirely handmade journal is a box of wonder: The cover has a paint-by-numbers theme, and the box structure is letterpress printed by Kate Fernandez of Fernandez and Sons. The book will be filled with brilliant work in individually bound chapbooks of prose and poetry, with art postcards and posters that you can remove and display.

The contributors in Filter III are:

Yusef Komunyakaa, Zachary Schomburg, Stacey Levine, Amanda Manitach, Maged Zaher, Sharon Arnold, Martha Silano, John Osebold, Rebecca Brown, Counsel Langely, Ed Skoog, Karen Finneyfrock, Sean Ennis, Sarah Mangold, Gala Bent, Rachel Contreni Flynn, David Lasky, Elizabeth Colen, Sandra & Ben Doller, Brandon Shimoda, Ben Beres, Brandon Downing, Sarah Kate Moore, Dan Rosenberg, Susan Rich, Susan Denning, Sid Miller, Sarah Bartlett, Shawn Vestal, Marie-Caroline Moir, Lucy Corin, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Jill McDonough, Jessica Goodfellow, Jessica Bonin, Friedrich Kerksieck , Erika Wilder, Elissa Washuta, David Bartone, Chris Dusterhoff, Britt Ashley, Becca Yenser, Anne Gorrick

Ti ckets for the Filter release party are on sale now through Brown Paper Tickets . Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door, and $5 for students and seniors.

Copies of Filter may be purchased at: tickerfinch.etsy.com

About Filter Literary Journal
Filter is a literary journal made entirely by hand. Each issue contains erasures and other literary art alongside unaltered poetry, fiction and visual art. Filter seeks to represent the work it holds on a visceral level, so that the book is as carefully crafted as the poetry, fiction and art that it contains.

Filter Literary Journal is grateful to 4Culture for their funding and support.

Philly Book Tour, Part II: Museum of Art OR She's Got Everything She Needs

2011-06-07T14:15:00.000-07:00

There was no photography allowed at the Mutter Museum, but at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (at least in the Impressionism galleries) the guards didn't seem to mind a snapshot here and there.

I have a love/hate relationship with the Impressionists--or shall I say their popularity has made it hard for this discriminating museum patron to fawn all over them--but I allowed myself to, this one time, appreciate Pissarro, Cezanne, Monet, and Manet, especially what they were able to do with color and light. These three examples of their work stopped me in my museum-sauntering tracks [top to bottom: Manet, Cezanne, Pissarro (sorry, but I did not write down titles--heavens!--and now I can't find the names of these online, though the Pissarro, I believe, is fittingly titled "Fog."]

Also of great interest and delight was Thomas Hirschhorn's "Camo - Outgrowth (Winter)," an installation of 119 globes with camouflage-patterned tape bulging out of various parts of said globes. Along with these were many photographs of people wearing camo: hunters, fashion models, soliders, even a camo-patterned backpack. Also, Dick Cheney in a combat suit with troops clapping behind him, also a military funeral. It's a very powerful piece.

And then there were the Duchamp galleries, which I had no idea were even there, and what a treat as I love Duchamp! It was the first time I'd heard about "Given: I. The Waterfall 2. The Illuminating Gas ..." As I wrote in my journal "OH MY GOD! You peer through two peep holes behind this makeshift wooden door and it's a model of a nude woman splayed out in a field, a wacky/tacky illuminated and perpetually-flowing (optical illusion") waterfall in the distance (how do they keep it going? Is it motorized? Does a guard change a battery every few months? Since it was installed in 1969?)--a post-coital scene? Or has she been raped? Murdered? Though she must be alive as she's holding a gas lamp. Creepy, but much more to admire here than the urinal or the bicycle wheel..." And what a mystery: Duchamp told the world he had stopped making art in 1946, then spent the next twenty years fashioning this final work. They found the materials, along with a "carefully compiled installation manual" after his death. Surprise! He had been doing his art after all. But how bizarre!

I am drawn to visual art because it unsettles me, removes me from ho-hum thought patterns, forces me to consider the role art plays in a given society, along with what compels artists to make art, the viewer to go see it (or pay millions of dollars to own it), and also why we get our culottes in a twist over it (I'm thinking of, for instance, Serrano's Piss Christ).

For me it's about whimsy, the vicarious pleasure of witnessing creative joy (not to mention an imaginative mind) of a Calder, a Chagall, a DeKooning, a Johns, a Picasso--or, the giddiness that ensued as I walked through a Henry Art Gallery chirping with live canaries.

I want to interact, react, feel. I try to stay open, but I draw the line at giant black canvasses (Ad Reinhardt be damned) . Black canvasses, though my friend David George tried to persuade me otherwise, don't do it for me. Nor does the minimalism of Ellsworth Kelley (not a big fan).

I only had two hours, but I crammed as much viewing in as I could muster without fainting from fatigue and overstimulation (!).

Next installment: The Chagall Exhibition

A Taste of Summer in Seattle

2011-06-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

It lasted two days, but at least it arrived on a Friday and didn't blow out till Sunday mid-day--much, much preferable to a cold, wet weekend leading into a gorgeous Monday morning.

On Saturday morning we packed up the car and headed out for a hike in the woods! This was the first time all year we didn't need to stuff sweatshirts, fleece jackets, raincoats, and wool hats into our day packs just in case. It was actually kinda hot on the sunny parts of the trail--and felt a lot more like 85 than the 72 degrees Weatherbug claims our Seattle temp climbed to, mainly because we've all been trained to accustom ourselves to 55-degree days in May/June. But not this weekend! Or, at least Saturday (high clouds--a marine layer--moved in on Sunday around noon--oh, well!)

But while the one-day heat wave lasted, we hit Scott's Dairy Freeze in North Bend, and boy did the vanilla malts taste good.

So go ahead and be cold and rainy all next week, Seattle; this past weekend has secured my Vitamin D, ice cream and French-fry, endorphin, and Fresh Air Fund high for at least the next five days.

Sweet Philly, Sweet Woodruff

2011-06-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

I took this photo at the Mutter Museum's adjoining Medicinal Garden. I enjoyed the garden because it was quiet, shady, had benches, and because I could sit there and relax without having to purchase a $3 latte. The weather in Philly was gorgeous--a tad hot on Thursday, but would a Seattle-ite complain? No way. Friday night a breeze came in from--where, the Jersey Shore? How far away could it be?--and my editor (Henry Israeli) and another Saturnalia Poet (Sebastian Agueldo) strolled the South Street neighborhood after dining at the lovely Pumpkin.

All weekend I was whisked from one delicious meal to the next, from one cozy and inviting home or hotel to another, always attended to by my hosts, the aforementioned Henry, and Harriet Levin, a wonderful poet who teaches at Drexel, where I was honored to visit one of her poetry writing classes.

When I wasn't doing the poet business I was sneaking in some sight-seeing. The Mutter Museum, which I'd been so looking forward to finally visiting, made me kinda nauseous (I think it was the conjoined twin exhibit that brought on a case of the queasies), but this lovely garden revived me in no time.

The day before I wedged a quick trip to the Philadelphia Museum of art between my 11:00 and 6:00 pm readings, spending some quality time with a room full of Pissarros, Manets, Monets, and Cezannes. I also ventured into the contemporary art galleries, and further back to the three Duchamp rooms, a wonderfully unexpected find. [No photography allowed.] I took the above photo while trying to hail a cab back to the Drexel campus. I'd forgotten all going to see the Rocky statue, but then there he was kind of unexpectedly as I walked to the other side of the museum. I snapped a few photos, and then one of this water/ice stand right next to it.

Looking back on my recent East coast odyssey, it seems fitting I was drawn to the medicinal garden, a place where many healing herbs are lovingly presented for all to enjoy. Fitting because all weekend I was taken care of by poets whom I admire and respect--treated as if I were important, as if poetry mattered, as if my poetry mattered.

It was good medicine.

Review of David Orr's Beautiful & Pointless

2011-05-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading David Orr’s Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry (Harper 2011), and for the most part it was an enjoyable read, mainly because Orr, besides knowing a lot about the po-business, has an uncanny ability to cause a reader like me to cackle, guffaw, and, well, LOL. For instance, "there are more transparently veiled personal references in modern poems than there are grits and South Carolina," and the whole bit about poets being part horse and part human (and thus not quite fitting into academia). In the final chapter of his book, "why bother?" he muses on whether it's so bad to play Dice Wars or watch an episode of Top Chef instead of reading or writing poems; it's a valid question, no doubt, but it also helps to put this all into perspective: who in their right might would choose to struggle through complex mathematical theorems when he or she could spend the day bowling, or knitting, or whatever floats your boat. In general I admire the way he pokes fun at poets and their petty squabbles, while at the same time making it resoundingly clear that poetry does matter to thousands of people (though, okay, 50% of them may only be reading Billy Collins).

Orr wastes no time letting us know that his goal is not to help novice poetry readers figure out how to read poems, those strange things they take one look at and go “I have no idea what this is … maybe I don’t like it?” No, no, it’s not going to be Orr’s task to assist the clueless reader with understanding what a sestina or a villanelle is—if you want to know about specific forms and what the heck metrics are, he reminds us you can go ahead and Google all that.

His focus, instead, will be analogous to “sit[ting] in a bar and listen [ing ] as a Georgia fan and a Clemson fan discuss a game they’ve just been to.” Never mind that you have no idea what a wide receiver does, or what it means when there’s a flag on the play. What you will learn while you’re sidled up to the bar with these two fellas will give you a sense of why anyone would love a game you have to play like somebody just hit your mother with a two-by-four.

All good in theory, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that there is no way in hell someone who isn’t acquainted with poetry would bother to read Orr’s book. First of all:

Because we are different things to different people at different times, it’s more helpful to think about combining unlike identities that it is to talk about the ‘I’ of the poem and the “author himself” (who is better thought of as a combination of selves, some of them potentially more personal in particular moments than others.

Does the author seriously think that the typical American non-poet is going to parse that one?

But okay, I give him credit for trying. Then he goes onto start talking about Confessionalism—Lowell, Sexton, Plath, the ones whose poetry depends on the “announcement of personal facts that might be embarrassing, disturbing, or simply the kind of thing usually considered indiscreet.” I’m not so sure about this definition, especially when he shares that Catullus was confessing his heart out back in 50 B.C., calling on the gods to have pity and “pluck out of me my destruction.” Nothing indiscreet or embarrassing same goes for a poem by Ann Sexton titled “In Celebration of My Uterus,” where she is quite discreet and doesn't embarrass herself in the least. In fact, her poem is not disturbing at all. It displays, in fact, much restraint. Sexton is Whitmanesque in vision and scope, and anything but personal in this poem:

There is enough here to please a nation

Many women are singing together of this:

one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,

one is at the aquarium tending a seal,

one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,

one is at the toll gate collecting,

one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,

one is straddling a cello in Russia,

one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,

one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,

one is dying but remembering a breakfast,

one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,

one is wiping the ass of her child,

one is staring out the window of a train

in the middle of Wyoming and one is

anywhere and some are everywhere and all

seem to be singing, although some can not

sing a note.

But okay, he messed up with defining Confessionalism, no biggie. I can get past it. Besides, he begs of us, in his introduction, to disagree with him, so really I’m only doing what he's called on me, on all of us, to do.

In the next chapter, “the political," he takes Robert Hass down for writing “pseudo-political poetry,” that is, poems that “put forward no argument, make no revelatory comparison, confront no new audience, engage no misconception in language …” etc., that basically Hass is either talking to himself or to an audience of his peers, all of whom don’t need any convincing about anything, but mostly not about anything to do with the Right, including Bush’s war. Orr scoffs at the notion that all poetry is political, and I applaud him for that (it always sounded like a cop-out to me), and I am glad that he shows us how King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” contains all the essential attributes of a really good political poem, but why doesn’t Orr provide any other examples of political poetry—great political poetry? Even a snippet of Wilfred Owens would do in a pinch, but there are hordes of 20^th and 21^st century masters of the political poem (Heffernan, Rich, C.K. Williams, Forche Baraka, Dickey, Wagoner, Wrigley, Kizer, Levertov, Komunyakaa, Harper, Levis…), and he’s neglected to cite even ONE of ‘em. In his defense, perhaps he didn’t anticipate that an actual poet would be reading his primer on poets and what they quibble/gossip/obsess about, but still, doesn’t he owe it to the general public to get it RIGHT about the great political poems being written, and not just the ones that were written before 9/11 but seem to be about 9/11? I am so sick of hearing about the chickens coming home to roost and the poem by Auden that’s actually about WW2, especially when we have poems like Roger Bonair Agard’s “All Black Penguin” to add to the conversation of what makes a truly great political poem.

But enough about that. The next chapter attempts to explain form. Call me dense, but I’ve been studying poetry for thirty-five years, and I have to say I had some trouble wading through some of this chapter (there was this half a page that dealt with this concept called “’X’ that we think (and we think the poet thinks we’re supposed to recognize as being associated with the poem”), but in the end I came out of it with this: one side thinks free verse is the shit, and the other side thinks form is the shit. There will never be any kind of resolution or agreement about this, but hey, some poets like writing in fixed forms, and you, too, should get drunk on the stuff if it’s your cup of whiskey. whatEV. But what got me was the part where he’s talking about a Karen Volkman sonnet, sharing how, according to Christian Bok, the poem is “radicalized,” when actually very akin to Anglo Saxon syllabics, that is, the earliest type of poetry in the English language. How, suddenly, did the kenning and the strong-stress alliterative line with the caesura down the middle suddenly become radical and new? And yet, this is what Bok/Orr tell us is so.

And now we’re onto ambition, and the 10-page explanation of what Great is, and why Lowell seemed like the hottest of the hot while he was alive (because he used words like “decry” and “battle”) whereas Bishop is now viewed as the way more Queen of the Moderns, and hey, so will be Kay Ryan the Grande-Dame of the early aughts. Seriously, the equation that male and white equals Great, though brought obviously to the fray in the ambition chapter, is pretty much apparent from page 1 of this book right through to “The Owl and the Pussy Cat” on the final page. How does Orr get away with alluding to a time when the poetry world was essentially a country club, even alluding to the fact that many (including him?!) still consider it a country club, without coming right out and saying, at least in his insular bubble of a poetry world, it remains a country club, a very white and mostly male one, where anyone with so much as a vowel at the end of his or her name might be refused a post-golf drink? His book is pretty much a white man-fest of the tallest order, and he doesn’t seem to have any problem with that, nor did his publisher. They should be ashamed.

As for why bother reading poetry, by the end of the book I’m sorta asking the same question myself. So you can shoot off your filthy mouth on Foetry? So you can maybe get ten people to read your lame-ass poem about some old poet dying and still being pissed that Mark Strand is a bigger big shot than you are? I mean… it’s enough to make me run in the other direction, and I’ve been in love with poetry for most of my life. Still, I’m a sucker for the stuff, and just like Orr’s dad, I keep coming back to that runcible spoon.

Yarn Bombing, Rocky Balboa Statue, and the City of Brotherly Love

2011-05-20T12:03:00.000-07:00

The countdown has started for my Philly trip! I roll into town right as rush-hour hits full swing on Wednesday, May 25. I read twice on Thursday the 26th: Noon at Drexel U, and 6 pm in downtown Philly. I make it to the NYC area about once every 6,752 years (I'm kind of like Haley's Comet), so this would be a great time to hear me read if your home is in PA, NJ, or NY.

I'm looking forward to taking photos of this lovely yarn-bombed statue of Rocky Balboa. Gonna fly now! I'll never forget being fifteen and watching Rocky suck down all those raw eggs. I was at the Forum Theatre in Metuchen. Where did you first hear the famous cries of Adrienne?!!! Adrienne?!!!

The Rocky Theme song was our Metuchen High School track team's Get Psyched! song. We listened to it incessantly on the school bus that chugged us along to our away track meets. I was never a very fast sprinter, but I still get pumped up when I hear this song.

And don't worry, yarn bombers: I will definitely be spending more time inside the museum cozying up with the art then hanging out with good ol' Rocky Balboa.

Barn Owl Review's Susan Grimm Reviews The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception

2011-05-19T12:46:00.001-07:00

Martha Silano
The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception
Winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize
Saturnalia, 2011
$14.00

The title of Martha Silano’s third book of poems is very indicative; it demands thought—“Little” as if we were to deal with trivial matters; “Office” suggesting the rote performance, the mundane. Coupled with this dismissive half-title is the mysterious, spiritual idea of the “Immaculate Conception,” suggesting that what is large and unfathomable can be institutionalized, summed up, reduced to a form.

This seeming contradiction or haystack of oppositions continues throughout the book where daily life, especially with small children, is tumbled together as if in a cyclotron with galaxies and aliens and space ships:

I’m thinking today of how we hold it together,
arrive on time with the bottle of Zinfandel, a six-pack

of Scuttlebutt beer, how we cover our wrinkles
with Visible Lift, shove the mashed winter squash

into the baby’s mouth, how we hold it all together
despite clogged rain gutters, cracked

transmissions, a new explanation for gravity’s
half-hearted hold. . . . (p. 40)

Why unite domestic life and the cosmos? Perhaps because we spend so much time feeling alien ourselves. Or perhaps because the skies give us distance and depth—we attain perspective. Or perhaps because each accommodates the absence in the other—the tender care of minutiae, the possibility and openness of space or the neediness of minutiae and the vast uncaring of space.

Silano writes a poetry of accumulation, in part because inundation is an issue, the microscopic necessaries covering us like a rug so deep and wide even the galaxy cannot accommodate it. Silano calls it “the behemoth of things needing doing.” (p. 77)

How can you juggle all the particles? The speed of Silano’s packed lines give it a try. There’s a lot to take in, and that’s the point. Silano boosts you out of your chair and pushes you to run whether she’s being petulant or luminous:

My vowels hate you
My adverbs hate you. The backyard

hates you. (p. 46)

and

seamlessly with sides of potato of carrot of corn
seamlessly while each door handle sings its own song

while giant cicadas ricochet off cycads and jellyfish sting
a gravy like the ether they swore the planets swam through

luminiferous millions of times less dense than air
ubiquitous impossible to define (p. 89)

Silano likes repetition and wordplay, setting up music in the ear and delighted gyration in the brain. She’s tonally diverse—aghast, but half-laughing. There’s a kind of ars poetica in “How to Sew.” And a few poems successfully flirt with non-sense—“That Spring A Room Appeared” or “You’re Like the Mean Man.”

Like all the best poets, she observes unflinchingly whether attuned to “Venus and Jupiter, low in the western sky” (p. 28) or the troubling, desperate love of the ordinary mother:

No matches, no lighter, no blanket. Just the cold air—
you, me, and the moon has no eyes so it can’t be waked up, my toadflax,

my stubborn thistle who wants not only to catch the fish but to remind it
how to breathe again in water. (p. 60)

--Susan Grimm

Susan Grimm is a native of Cleveland, Ohio. Her poems have appeared inWest Branch, Poetry East, The Journal, and other publications. In 1996, she was awarded an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council. Her chapbook, Almost Home, was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1997. Her book of poems, Lake Erie Blue,was published by BkMk Press in 2004. She also edited Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems which waspublished by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2006. Recently, she won the inauguralCopper Nickel Poetry Prize. Her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue is due out in July, 2011. She is a poetry editor for Barn Owl Review.

Also by Susan Grimm:

Review of Dick of the Dead by Rachel Loden.

Hot off the Press Review of Dorothea Lasky's Black Life

2011-05-16T14:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve been slowly reading Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life for the last six or so weeks, looking forward to the time each night just before bed when I crawl into bed, & turn on the night-light to lap up a few of her poems before the book falls onto my face, and I turn into sleep. Sometimes I am lying there next to my husband, and I will be giggling, or saying I can’t believe she did that or holy shit, and my husband will say, okay, let me read it, so I will pass him her book and point to the poem titled “Mike I had an Affair,” which begins

Mike, I had an affair

With Jakob Tushinea, the poet

and goes on with

I peered into his crevices

And upon his bed I peered into more

Like the kind of things that the monsters make.

He was a monster, no

He was not a monster, Mike

His skin was soft and wild

And when he smiled

I was a bit on fire

and my husband goes, wow, that’s pretty funny, and I go, but listen to this, I don’t know what to make of it. Is she serious? & recite from “It Feels Like Love”:

When he and I are together, it just feels like love

And when we are talking and laughing together

It feels like love …

And his eyes on me and the way he looks

And what he says and the way I feel

I mean, if one of my students turned this in, I would give him or her un petite impromptu lecture-ette on specific nouns and verbs, on getting past banal generalities, but maybe that’s Lasky’s gift: she sticks a poem like this in her book, and suddenly we remember being in high school, being a newbie poet, and writing this kind of drivel, and it reminds us (okay, sorry, ME) of Richard Brautigan’s The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, those lovely (sappy but also kookie/quirky) love poems of his.

I love this book because one minute Lasky’s speaker is plainly and flatly jotting down her high-school-diary-entry retorts (“Atheists are all over the world and they are such idiots”) and the next she is Sappho, Neruda, O’Hara, and Breton all wrapped up into one (“Like a carrot I will be everything God can’t see). I also love that this is a speaker who goes down on her boss, loves a mathematician, and because she writes, in “Poem to My Ex-Husband,”

Dear husband, I tried to write you an email

But I didn’t have the right address

My husband, I love you so much

Will you be mine forever

I know you are married now

Does that matter

I can still remember holding hands

I bought a purse …

And then we got a car together

And then it was over

My sweet baby you were always there

You always

Loved me, in the shower you would bathe me

And feed me later in bed spaghetti or something else…

That “or something else” is what gives her away, along with the spaghetti, of course. This is how we know she is not truly an awful poet writing drivel, writing a treacle-tart- wielding hack, but a smart chick who has studied her Sapphics and those sweet Chilean odes, as in, later on in this poem:

I will haunt you even when I am dead

I will wear plastic horseshoes on my ghostly suit …

Your gesture will be my gesture …

I place your moving mouth next to a red drill

And together we got to someplace like a beach

Where they give us things we need, like life.

Again, note: someplace like a beach. Yet another giveaway Lasky’s playing with the notion of the love-sick teenager writing her first poems about unrequited loves and how she will stroll down with her beloved to watch a sunset on the pier, but in this case the gig’s up as we’re not given a beach but a stock image that could or might be a beach, but could also be a mountain sunset, or any other number of “likes” listed in a Match.com profile.

Black Life is about, among other things, death (her father has died), love lack, impermanence, being eaten by flames, the search for identity and acceptance of one’s past selves (“I was once so sexless in the midst of love / When I was young / And was not sticky with a thousand men”), the sun, rotting, and whether the speaker is rotting or water, “a watery nymph that is hot and wet / Like a wetted beast”—whether she is the sun, God is the sun, or god is a black bird—and it is also a great poem of the bragging poet who says

You are reading the work of a great poet, possi-

bly one of the greatest ones of your time.

But don’t read this book for what it is about. Read it for the cool, cool ways she juxtaposes the mundane with the miraculous, heightened language with the flattest of flatland (southern Nebraska?) prose/bad, bad poetry you can’t even call poetry because it could have been written by a ninny like your own 15-year old self, such as

I am just so very sad

such as

But a nightmare you can’t get out of because it is the night

That is all encompassing

I get all encompassed by the night every day

such as (has Lasky’s speaker ever heard of Louis Armstrong? Has she ever heard Tony Bennett and k.d. laing do their tear-inducing rendition of “What a Wonderful World?”)

There are children playing around you. They know more than you will ever know.

I haven’t gotten this stuck on a book of poetry since, let me see, probably Natasha Saje’s Red Under the Skin or Aimee Nezhukamatathil’s Miracle Fruit. I mean, I am some kind of smitten. In fact, I find myself wanting to make a table of flat lines and o so incredibly leaping, surprising, high-wire act lines, so please let me indulge myself:

Flat	Wow
I like to think / About things that are nice / And Pretty	My heart belongs to a lion / I love his pelt and covet his heart.
What people don’t understand about being a genius is / Is that it is hard	Whoever those postmodernists are that say / There is no universal have never spent any time with an animal
The sunshine on your face and neck	Because I know the inside of your face
I have been a lot of places / Most of them in my mind	Mathematical laundress / of the forgotten egret
I am sick of feeling	When you are in the grave all that you will be able to say is mommy.

Maybe it’s fascination tinged with nostalgia. Reading these poems, we are twelve and peeking into our sister’s diary. She is fourteen. We do not even know men have erections. She is having sex with her boyfriend in her bedroom closet. We read, feel guilty, read some more, our eyes wide, our mouths not hanging open (because most of us don’t actually gape, do we?), but internally a kind of permanent gaping-wound sunburn, burned by her words, by that knowledge, which is the kind of black, black burning Black Life is all about.

Nat'l Poetry Month Sweepstakes Winner, a Tad Belated

2011-05-13T18:10:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to Kathleen Gunton, winner of a copy of my book, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception. To obtain your copy, please contact me at your earliest convenience with your mailing address. Thanks to all who participated in the 2011 National Poetry Month Giveaway.

Poetry Presentations!

2011-05-10T14:27:00.000-07:00

My favorite two days of the quarter have come and gone once again, and this quarter was no exception: after class I had to run to my car, get myself home, and start boiling a big vat of water for a huge plate of linguine to smother with tomato sauce and fresh grated parmesan. Why, why, why would I want to run home and eat a huge plate of pasta?

Because of Diane Lockward's poem, Linguine, of course-- how well my students presented this hunger-inducing poem, sharing with us the smell and tastes of not only linguine but of fresh basil, "oregano rubbed between our palms," of what it means to "enjoy it, like lovers, every way we could . . . briskly boiled, lighted oiled." Ah, yes, and all that "pulling and sucking." Lockward's poem is nothing less than a feast of the senses--it reminds me, each time my students present it, of the best things in life: passionate love and garlic-laden, oily strands of Al Dente pasta.

Yes, it's true. As their food-themed English 101 instructor, every quarter I rally my students' to create Power Point poetry presentations using work by Diane Lockward, Aimee Nezhukamatathil, Li Young-Lee, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Campbell McGrath, and Juan Felipe Herrera, yielding unexpected surprises--moments where students help me to "get" at an aspect in a poem I might not have considered--the significance of a certain image, the alliterative power of a specific phrase--and this time around was no different, except I wasn't expecting four of my students, the ones assigned "World Unity Salsa" by Juan Felipe Herrera, to contact Mr. Herrera and ask him furnish them with a personal greeting to all of Bellevue College in general , and specifically to their instructor, Martha Silano. I mean, I thought they were joking when they began their presentation with "we contacted him, and ...", but they were serious. Herrera not only replied back to them: he sent them an incredible, not-available-on-You-Tube recitation of their assigned poem, which we all listened to in class today with great amazement.

When we were discussing the poem last week, the Herrera poem group confided in me that they felt squeamish (or just plain stupid) about getting up in front of the room and reading their assigned poem (let's face it--it has a lot of repetition, and it is a little over the top, especially when it gets to the "Breathe baby breath" part), so I told them to see if they could find a recording of the poet reading his own silly poem.

I never dreamed they'd actually take the time to track down Herrera's email address and ask him for just that.

Hearing Herrera talking to all of us as we sat in our little stuffy classroom in C-140. Hearing him pronounce my name and thank me for using his poem in my class. Now that was sure something!

The best part was when Simon shared, in the conclusion, how when they'd met to work on their presentation, each brought along their favorite jar of salsa and a bag of corn chips, and afterwards they all hung out and watched a game together.

Now that's what I call World Unity Salsa!

Thanks so much to Simon, Jake, Tristan, and Joe for spicing up our class today with their in-depth analysis and A+ audio-visuals. But even more importantly, for teaching this veteran instructor to never, ever underestimate the abilities and motivations of even the most anti-poetry-seeming students.

And thanks too, to Juan Felipe Herrera, for responding to their request for a first-hand rendition of his poem. You knocked this instructor's socks off!

Revving Up for my Far-Flung Philly Book Tour

2011-05-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

On May 26, I'll be reading at 6:30 pm with Dorothea Lasky & Star Black at The Athenaeum in the City of Brotherly Love. I am so excited to share the stage once again with Ms. Black, and to meet and read with Ms. Lasky, whose Black Life I've been reading and reveling in these past few weeks (I've been enjoying it so much I decided to buy her earlier collection, Awe.)

I will also be reading on May 26 at Drexel University during the noon hour.

Between all this and on Friday and Saturday, I will be touring around Philly, visiting the Mutter Museum, which I anticipate is going to be very intense because it deals with medical curiosities, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which will offer comic relief in the form of an exhibition titled The Peacock Male: Exuberance and Extremes in Masculine Dress.

Needless to say, I can hardly wait to board my plane!

If you live anywhere near Philly, or in Philly proper, it would be great to see you at one or both of these readings.

One More Fan of The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception

2011-05-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Kristin Abraham and New Pages.com for reviewing my new collection, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception.

Abraham writes "these poems are quirky and playful," with "wonderful moments of play with language, rhythm and sound . . . [they] take the "awe" away from prayer and religion in order to ground it in the immediately real, the more understandable--but still reverent."

She also calls it "a constantly surprising little treasure to return to often."

4 Courses Dazzles & Shines

2011-04-29T07:29:00.000-07:00

It was an evening for the books.

Jennifer Borgess Foster, matronmind of this awe-inspiring event, toiled endless hours coordinating with Tom Douglas and his crew and 5 Five Pie to create a menu that included crisp apple with bacon bites, arugula salad, triticale with asparagus tarts, and three kinds of pie. Meanwhile, Oyster Bill was busy donating dozens of fresh, raw bivalves for the first course. There were also many volunteers buzzing around the hive of volunteer-coordinator Sara Brickman, many of whom woke at dawn Thursday morning to help prepare for the big event. Dave Mecklenburg shucked oysters, along with Bill and Lang, while a whole host of hosts and hostesses, and one fantastic bartender, scurried around to help with the serving and pouring.

I knew this event would be fun and delicious, but I had no idea just how dazzling a Richard Hugo House "do" could be. The cabaret space had been transformed into an upscale dining situation. We could have been at Spinasse! And the food was as good as, well, what you'd dive into at the Dahlia Lounge.

Ummy.

As if this was not enough, the delightful Jennifer Borges Foster emceed the event to perfection, her giant rhinestone hoops jangling as she encouraged us to go get our second "flight" of wine and raise our glasses yet again.

And then the reading amongst and amidst!

Lang Cook read a piece about oysters. It was delightful.

I read about apples, pork products, cabbage, and gravy.

Kevin Craft read of breaking bread and of salad days. Pure genius.

And Kate Lebo, in transplendent chiffon purple polkadots, rounded out the eve with tales of pie from pumpkin to rhubarb custard.

All of it dedicated to the life of Kim Ricketts, book sojourner extraordinaire and foodie-maven who left this world way too soon.

Thanks so much to all who contributed to making this an unforgettable event.

4 Courses at Richard Hugo House: April 27, 6:30 PM

2011-04-26T18:28:00.000-07:00

Drum roll!!! The 4 Courses reading at Richard Hugo House is less than 24 hours away, and the clock is ticking! Miraculously, this reading by local Seattle writers Langdon Cook, Kevin Craft, Kate Lebo, and yours truly is not yet sold out. For $15, you get to hear four great readers between bites of:

Butterscotch Bacon Bites with Crisp Apple

Spring Vegetable Succotash Toast

Marinated Beet Salad

Asparagus Leek Tart

Triticale Berry Risotto

Tom's Triple Coconut Cream Pie

Prior to these yummy delights, forager/author Langdon Cook will be shucking oysters while he reads a chapter from his delightful book, Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager, just out in paperback.

Next it will be my turn to turn on the burner and let the simmering begin. Poems about apples, sausages, kapusta, artichokes, and gravy will abound.

Following more grazing, Poetry Northwest editor Kevin Craft will step up to the podium to share a delicious array of kick-a food-lovin' melodies.

Kate Lebo will round out the night with her beautiful, pie-ful poesy.

Food & Words: what could be better? And not just any food and words, but some of the best of both around.

If you want to eat well and give your ears a treat, make sure to be there!

Tulip Festivals, Gender Roles, & Child Labor

2011-04-25T12:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, call me a fool. At noon on the sunniest, warmest day of the year, I decided to take the kids up north to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. This has become a yearly pilgrimage for my daughter and I--we look forward to it all year. I usually spring her from school midweek, and we enjoy the farm scenery and walk through the fields reveling in the purples, mauves, and pinks in relative calm.

This was not be the case on Saturday. We merged onto I-5 at 12:30 PM. 3 hours later, we exited onto Old Highway 99, just south of Mount Vernon. When we got to town, it was bumper to bumper traffic along the tulip route. Another hour, and we still were not in any way, shape or form tiptoeing through the tulips. As we stopped and started along a stretch of backroad, I let them out of the car to kick around in the plowed dirt and marvel over a ditch that my son immediately begged me to let him cross to the other side of. I consented. They ran along the cars until I realized it was potentially fatal (motorcycles zipping in and out of lanes). It was 63 degrees, but because it's been in the 30s/40s most of the month, it felt like a heatwave. Finally, I consulted a map and took a sharp left off the car-glutted road and hightailed it to a field with just two colors of tulips: red and purple. My daughter was a little let down (last year we went to a field that contained six or more varieties!), but at least we were out of the car.

My son reluctantly walked a little way, allowed me to snap a few photos of him, but when we got to the second field (this one was all red and yellow), he told me that boys don't walk in tulip fields, that if we had taken his best friend along, he wouldn't have wanted to hang out with him again for at least a month (why a month? did it take a month for the tulip shame and embarrassment to wear off?). Meanwhile, my daughter couldn't get enough of the sumptuous blooms; she cried when I told her we weren't going to Tulip Town because there wasn't a single parking spot, which anyway costs $5 and it's only open another hour.

A day ago my son begged me to polish his nails. Last night he was hugging his best friend, crying with him when it was time for the play date to end.

Now he is telling me boys don't walk among beautiful living things with big floppy red petals and the blackest of inner secrets.

I felt achy and couldn't shake a headache. I got a head rush if I moved too suddenly. I had spent four hours in a car to walk in a couple of tulip fields for less than an hour.

We got back in the car to join the long line of traffic back to Seattle. I rationalized that I hardly eat meat anymore, so what was a few wasted gallons of gasoline, but my cavalier attitude probably had more to do with carbon monoxide poisoning.

The only thing that was going to heal my pain was, of course, Dairy Delite. But to get to Dairy Delite we were going to have to head north on I-5 again. No way!

You guessed it: fries and sundaes/shakes for dinner at the evilest of evil: Dairy Queen. I felt so much better after, which is sick because I know that children pick those tomatoes that go into Heinz ketchup.

It is sinister.

And now it's raining again, so I know quite definitively that Saturday really was the one day to see the tulips.

Was it worth it? Yes, it was.

It's Earth Day 2011

2011-04-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

and I am sitting here thinking about some things we can all do to best celebrate this day where we show we care about about our planet and the people who live on it:

1. If you have a yard, plant a vegetable garden. It doesn't have to be an elaborate deal, just a little patch of dirt in a semi-sunny spot. Dig up the earth, add a little compost, and rake it nice and smooth. Then make a few rows and toss in some seeds. If you live here in the Pacific Northwest, greens are your best bet, because they germinate at low temps. Mustard, for instance, germinates at 45 degrees, so you don't have to build a cold frame to see those little seedlings popping up in a week or so. Kale and lettuces are also a good bet. If there's a child around, have them help you. As you're planting, talk about what you're doing and why. Oh, and if you don't have a yard, find out about where you can rent space in a community garden, if your city is lucky enough to have such a program.

2. Buy some food from a local farmer. Here in my neck of the woods, Columbia City Farmer's Market opened this week. I also attended a Farmer's Market on the Bellevue College campus as part of their Earth Week extravaganza. Full Circle Farms had a stall, and I bought some nice rapini, spinach, and baby carrots still on their stalks. $2.50 for six little carrots might seem like a lot of dough when you can get a burger for $1 at McDonald's, but I munched a couple while sitting at a picnic table with a former student, and they tasted like candy, but were satisfying and delicious. The spinach went into a barbecued tempeh burrito lunch I put together in 5 minutes when I got home. The rapini will be made into a decadent pasta dish with lots of garlic, olive oil, and parmesan cheese, also a very quick meal (takes about as long to make as it does to boil a pot of water).

3. Do some research on composting your food waste. Here in Seattle we are supremely lucky to be partnered with a compost-making company, Cedar Grove Compost. Each week they pick up all of our food scraps along with our yard waste, and turn it into rich loam they sell all over the state, including at Lowe's. I know I could be composting with a worm bin in my yard, and I am planning to do that one of these days, but in the meantime our garbage consists only of a small amount of unrecyclable plastic, the occasional styrofoam insert from a package, and really not much else.

4. Find out about where your food comes from. Not just how the animals are being raised and slaughtered, what they are being fed, but about the people who are planting and harvesting your food. A good place to start is here, with Bon Appetit Management Company's just-released Farm Worker Inventory. Find out what farm laborers such as those who belong to the Coalition of Immokolee Workers are doing to fight against conditions that force laborers to pick at 32 lb. bin of tomatoes for a wage of 45 cents, which is standard practice. [To earn a minimum wage, workers must pick 2.4 tons of tomatoes in a 10-hour day. 2.4 tons! And this is all done without mechanization; they are carrying these crates all day long in the Florida heat and humidity.]

5. Skip the burgers and bacon on April 22. Why? Because farm-raised animals are the single highest contributor to greenhouse gases on this planet. 18% of greenhouse gases are attributed to cattle farts, which are heavy on the methane, likely because they are eating a food (corn) they were not designed to eat.

Okay, that's just a small start, but even doing one of these things can help sustain the Earth, along with the people who live on it.

It's in our power. It's in our hands.

Falling Out of the Blogosphere

2011-04-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

or something like that, as I aim to write a NoPoMo poem a day (though sometimes it's every other day . . . ), and learning a lot about the benefits of being a more-or-less daily poet instead of a sporadic once-a-week-or-so poet.

When I started the one a day thing I was away at a writer's colony, so of course it was a cinch. Then I got home, went back to work, and the energy sort of left the wine (to quote Robert Bly in "The Man in the Black Coat Turns").

It was time to dig down deep. And deeper. To recap, I started bringing my notebook to the playground, just like back in the day when I had babies and they napped in the stroller while I wrote! It's harder to do now, though, cuz they want me to take my turn on the monkey bars, which how can I say no to that? I mean, how many 50-year old moms do you know who can make it all the way across, swinging like a lemur?

Okay, but I managed to write two poems that way. Not while swinging. Not quite that agile yet. But before and after swinging.

And then I came up with an even better idea: leaving for work a little early (okay, quite earlier, as in, before the sun rises), pulling into the #1 parking spot (yep, it's always there if you get up early enough), and writing for 30 minutes before I grab hold of the briefcase and head for the door.

Oh, man, what a sweet way to start the day, though in truth I only go to work in an actual office two days a week, so the rest of the time it's me against the laundry, the laptop, and the little ones (though they're the least bothersome now that they spend 6 hours a day in school).

Okay, one other suggestion for getting the daily poem knocked out: arrive 15 minutes early to pick up your son or daughter from their after school activity. My son plays Ultimate frisbee till 4:40 pm on Thursdays, so I pulled up to the school at 4:20, giving me 15 minutes of silent and golden writing time. Opened up my laptop and typed up what I'd scribbled in my notebook that morning as fast as my fingers allowed me. Had to drop it all fast and run to get him--not a big fan of the sudden whisking away and switch from Writer to Mom in half a nanosecond--but at least I started something I now look forward to finishing up . . . after the kids fall asleep tonight.

Our Lady of Perpetual Excuses is beginning to morph into Our Lady of I Can Do This Daily Poem Thang. I don't do it often, but I am going to take myself a leetle teeny-tiny bow.

Do you deserve to take a bow as well? Please, if you have a secret for getting yourself writing each (or nearly each day), share it here. We could all use a bit of advice and inspiration. Thanks!

Reasons for Not Writing

2011-04-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

1. I had to take my son to the doctor and hospital yesterday. For a diagnostic chest x-ray. He has bronchitis. Thankfully not pneumonia, but he's been out of school two weeks, and now another week while he gets rid of his nasty cough. A kid at home sick is keeping me from writing poetry.

2. My spring garden must be planted. Today I must pull weeds and buy spinach starts, and plant mustard and arugula seeds. Today I must dig the earth and mulch it with compost. A hoe in hand is pre-empting my fifteen minutes of scribbling.

3. For reasons I will not go into, the playroom needs to be organized. I need to go to Storables and purchase white wicker baskets. Then I need to hide all the unsightly toys, organize all the sightly toys, and make the playroom look like it's being used without making it look messy. (This never happens in real life, but never mind). While I am organizing the puzzles and blocks, I will not have a pen in hand.

4. My daughter has been begging me all week to take her to the Science Center. I love taking her to the Science Center, but this will make it difficult to . . . you know what.

Excuses? Worthy excuses? I hate excuses. (If you read my blog, you should know that about me by now.)

Listen: I know that there's always a good and valid excuse out there not to write--vomiting due to a dose of chemotherapy, trips to Costco for diapers and wipes, a splitting headache, having to take the cat to the vet. There is always a good excuse to not pull out one's notebook for even fifteen minutes and jot down a few images or recall a childhood memory of chasing after the Good Humor truck.

Sometimes we're just too tired or defeated or brimming with loss to pick up a pencil or pen.

Okay, I'll make a deal with myself. Sometime today, when I'm resting from digging or patting down dirt, I will pull out my notebook and write a poem about seeing my son's scrawny naked chest against a wall, standing so still and holding his breath, and/or about planting a garden with two 6-year olds. I do have a lot to rejoice about, to be thankful for, but even if I didn't, even if he did have pneumonia or worse, I still know I would turn to poetry to help me through it.

That's what poetry, to me, is about.

Report on Days #4, #5 and #6, NaPoMo

2011-04-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

The first three days of NaPoMo I was away at a scholarly retreat center, so piece of cake. Then I returned home and it got a little more difficult, but not so much that I've thrown in the towel.

However, since we're sharing . . .

I wrote my day #4 poem on a bus, one of my favorite places to be an anonymous writer with all her creature comforts at her side (pen, notebook, satchel with lunch, water, other essentials).

In order to write my day #5 poem, I had to work on it in my car outside my daughter's school for five minutes, then finish it while my son and I waited for the pediatrician to walk in. Luckily I was channeling Richard Hugo, so I was loopy with risk and waxing on the edge of sentimental.

For day #6's attempt, I sat on a park bench alternately watching my daughter and her friend play on the swings and reading GC Waldrep's Archicembalo for inspiration.

Note: I don't know what it's like where you live, but not many moms come to the park with a notebook and a book of poems, all ready to have it out with words right there by the monkey bars. If I'd had time to notice, I might have registered a few stares, but actually I doubt it as thankfully there's not a whole lot of judgment going down in my 'hood.

I am trying, in a sorta 12-step way, to not think about how I am going to write a poem a day for the rest of the month, but tomorrow I'm planning to write my poem at the coffee shop where I hang out for an hour while my daughter's in art class.

Okay, won't plan any further than that . . . and in the meantime I can look forward to my reward for writing a poem tomorrow (a lemon cupcake!!).

For years I've looked on in admiration as so many of my poet friends do the poem-a-day thing for the entire month of April. It feels good to be among them at long last.

Stuff I Got to Research While Working on My Day 3 Poem

2011-04-04T07:41:00.000-07:00

Top to Bottom: Flying Asparas of the Tang Dynasty (rocking goddess who worshipped the Buddha with song and ribbon-ful dance); Chilean flamingo, yellow-bellied millipede, a palm reading diagram, a documentary from 1960 about migrant agricultural workers, and a specimen of radium and polonium extracted from 5,000+ tons of pitchblende.

National Poetry Month Free Poetry Book Giveaway

2011-04-03T18:01:00.000-07:00

Wanna free copy of my new book, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Award? If you answered yes, here's all you need to do:

1. Comment on this post, saying something like "Count me in!"

2. Wait till the end of April, when I throw all the names into a hat and pick just one.

3. If you are chosen, I will contact you and ask you to provide me with your ground mail address.

4. A few days later you will receive your very own copy of a book by the poet whom David Kirby says you should be listening to instead of CNN.

Yes, folks, it's that easy.

Happy National Poetry Month, everyone. May poetry ring through your ears, down your halls, and through your very own special piece of heaven all the live-long April.

End of Day #2 and NaPoMo Poem-a-Day-ing Away

2011-04-02T23:10:00.001-07:00

or should I say choking, though not in the sense you think! Am working on a poem about artichokes. They are quite a lovely vegetable, are they not? And loaded with antioxidants. Who knew?