10.29.15

Real posts coming, I swear.  I have been sick and it's thrown all of my rhythms off. Make do with drive-by posting for now?




Swimming



Carl Phillips



Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse for
Why not stay awhile, usually that hour when
the coyotes roam the streets as if they’ve always
owned the place and had come back inspecting now
for damage. But what hasn’t been damaged? History
here means a history of storms rushing the trees
for so long, their bowed shapes seem a kind of star—
worth trusting, I mean, as in how the helmsman,
steering home, knows what star to lean on. Do
people, anymore, even say helmsman? Everything
in waves, or at least wave-like, as when another’s
suffering, being greater, displaces our own, or
I understand it should, which is meant to be
different, I’m sure of it, from that pleasure
Lucretius speaks of, in witnessing from land
a ship foundering at sea, though more and more
it all seems related. I love the nights here. I love
the jetty’s black ghost-finger, how it calms
the harbor, how the fog hanging stranded just
above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind
parts of those questions from which I half-wish
I could school my mind, desperate cargo,
to keep a little distance. An old map from when
this place was first settled shows monsters
everywhere, once the shore gives out—it can still
feel like that: I dive in, and they rise like faithfulness
itself, watery pallbearers heading seaward, and
I the raft they steady. It seems there’s no turning back.



I like this real and metaphorical navigation, and can relate to the feeling of being out in town at night, but not ready to be done with the night. It is also nice to think of our lives as a saga or odyssey, it makes the events more weighty and important. I know I would like to think of my life as important, even though we know the opposite to be true. (Or maybe make important small things that ordinarily wouldn't be important. Especially in the face of "Everything/ in waves, or at least wave-like, as when another’s/ suffering, being greater, displaces our own, or/ I understand it should, which is meant to be/ different,") Although if the speaker is looking for importance amidst the chaos of the other lives they are a part of, perhaps without trying to minimize the struggles of the other people, they can look to this part for comfort: "I the raft they steady", if we imagine that as a transformative craft rather than the more literal image of an oceanic coffin. (Now the issues of the peripheral people are starting to look really heavy!). Hope you like. 

10.17.15

Fresh weekend words for you.

10-15-15

Thursday morning wind from the East

picked up leaves in jets of warmth

and chill.

They scraped and chattered on their

mission of completion.

The sun wore a halo of vapors

and of prisms,

the seconds and the starlings were moving

with the season.

Thursday morning wind, even before,

shook the dewy jewelry from the firs

raining anew the curtains of prisms

and of birds.

What are my words, amidst this wind,

and by extension, what am I?

a small, volatile person who will compost

amid the crackling heaps of

maple leaves and sodden moss?

These avenues with lines of trees

like lines of spines, titles, erect,

are paper all, and will lose their human gloss.

The names, perhaps, we will endeavor

not to forget.

To speak, and shout, and signal

are small and fading sounds

as wind draws in.

10.15.15

Last Thursday was National Poetry day. It seems that, in part due to social media, we have a national everything day. A while ago, someone was lamenting that National Equality for Women day was being overshadowed by National Grilled Cheese day.

For me, every day is/should be about or for poetry, because poetry is for everyone and for daily life. We all deserve something beautiful. But, if it takes a national day to get someone reading something they normally wouldn't read, then excellent.

Since I totally missed this (valid reasons but whatever!), I will try and share other's entries for NPD/a little roundup. (yeaaah totally lazy right?).

Wikipedia as usual with the basics of how it began. This year's theme is "Light". In the US, National Poetry Month is in April.

From the Forward Arts Foundation:

Every year, all are invited to join in, breaking with the tyranny of prose by thinking of a poem and sharing it imaginative ways, with the hashtags #nationalpoetryday and #thinkofapoem. What does it mean, to see the world as a poet does? The best responses to our Make Like A Poet digital challenge were blazed across Blackpool Lights on the day.

(I kinda hate hashtags. But I do like the idea of breaking up with how we normally speak/read/write, and see the world through different eyes). Read on for other participants in the event.

It was started by William Sieghert and is celebrating 21 years. From the British Radio 4 celebration:

Last Thursday, on the festival’s 21st birthday, Radio 4 welcomed it into full adulthood with We British, which aimed to explore the last 1,400 years of British history, culture and experience through the words of both great and lesser-known poets.

(...)

Best – and most memorable – were the poems themselves. Each programme was peppered with them; deftly chosen, beautifully read, they conveyed a sense of the living past that went far beyond bookshelf history. Among dozens of highlights, there was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lilting, alliterative and oddly exotic; Marvell’s unnervingly persuasive To His Coy Mistress, delivered with seismic gusto by Barrie Rutter; Wordsworth’s mournful, still-relevant sonnet London, 1802; and a section of Eliot’s era-defining The Waste Land, read in turn by Alec Guinness, Paul Scofield, Eileen Atkins, Jeremy Irons, and Viggo Mortensen.

If you'd like something a little bit lighthearted, here are some poems dedicated to babies, friends, even goats! (Do view the videos, I am particularly curious to watch one that a woman recites as she signs simultaneously in BSL).

The Scottish Poetry Library has a series of cards on this years' theme. I don't understand Scots at all, but there appear to be some works in that language as well--always lovely to hear works in languages other than English.

There were many great celebrations of poetry on this day. I particularly like the idea of a "poem in your pocket" for the day, to act as a lens, worry stone, or just a reminder of beauty.

And for something completely different, Poe's The Raven as read by Christopher Walken. He's totally knitting in this video!

10.6.15

Here are some weekend words for you:

10/3/15

Today I picked up an acorn

and all around me were lights

and sirens

and symbols of strife.

Today I put a shining acorn

in my hand

and felt the line where it’s

cap had been.

Though the dark globe was spinning,

hurling rocks at innocence

moving every which way,

I held the acorn like a telescope

to cover the setting sun.





And here is the antidote to the feeling in that piece, with something that showed up in my inbox. Sometimes we need these things. (By Walt Whitman)



That Music Always Round Me




That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, yet long untaught I did not hear,

But now the chorus I hear and am elated,


A tenor, strong, ascending with power and health, with glad notes of daybreak I hear,

A soprano at intervals sailing buoyantly over the tops of immense waves,

A transparent base shuddering lusciously under and through the universe,

The triumphant tutti, the funeral wailings with sweet flutes and violins, all of these I fill myself with,

I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite meanings,

I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving, contending with fiery vehemence to excel each other in emotion;

I do not think the performers know themselves—but now I think I begin to know them.

10.1.15

This weekend for Smithsonian Museum Live day (you should totally sign up, I got two museum passes free for the day) I went to MOHAI in Seattle. It was my first time in the new location, and they did a great job. It looks good and makes one proud to be local. As always, I was inspired (not just by writing, there was a fantastic shirt dress in deco Seattle fabric made for the 62 World's Fair exhibition that I long to re-create!) and so I bring some of that to share with you.

Allen Ginsberg visited Seattle in February of 1956, the year he would publish Howl. In true Beat fashion, he apparently hitchhiked up here from SF with Gary Snyder to backpack around.

Afternoon Seattle



Busride along waterfront down Yessler under street bridge to the old red Wobbly Hall–

One Big Union, posters of the Great Mandala of Labor, bleareyed dusty cardplayers dreaming behind the counter...'but these young fellers can't see ahead and we nothing to offer'–

After Snyder his little red bear and bristling Buddha mind I weeping crossed Skid Road to 10c. beer.

Labyrinth wood stairways and Greek movies under Farmers Market second hand city, Indian smoked salmon old overcoats and dry red shoes,

Green Parrot Theater, Maytime, and down to the harbor side the ships, walked on Alaska silent together–ferryboat coming faraway in mist from Bremerton Island dreamlike small on the waters of Holland to me

–and entered me head the seagull, a shriek, sentinels standing over rusty harbor iron dock work, rocks dripping under rotten wharves slime on the walls–

the seagull's small cry–inhuman not of the city, lone sentinels of God, animal birds among us indifferent, their bleak lone cries representing our souls.

A rowboat docked and chained floating in the tide by a wharf. Basho's frog. Someone left it there, it drifts.

Sailor's curio shop hung with shells and skulls a whalebone mask, Indian seas. The cities rot from oldest parts. Little red mummy from Idaho Frank H. Little your big hat high cheekbones crosseyes and song.

The cities rot from the center, the suburbs fall apart a slow apocalypse of rot the special trolleys fade

the cities rot the fires escapes hang and rust the brick turns black dust falls uncollected garbage heaps the wall

the birds invade with their cries the skid row alley creeps downtown the ancient jailhouse groans bums snore under the pavement a dark Turkish bath the cornice gapes at midnight

Seattle!–department stores full of fur coats and camping equipment, mad noontime businessmen in gabardine coats talking on streetcorners to keep up the structure, I float past, birds cry,

Salvation Army offers soup on rotting block, six thousand beggars groan at a meal of hopeful beans.

(Note: he mistakenly refers to Bainbridge Island as Bremerton. No harm, no foul)

In this article from Seattle Met, this particular segment stood out to me:

It’s striking to read these lines while living in the relentless newness of today’s Seattle. Ginsberg’s vision of a decrepit pre–Space Needle port town captures a candid city that does not try to conceal its age. The sites Ginsberg watched succumbing to urban decay were visual reminders that this was once a place where Yukon-bound adventurers stopped to load up on pickaxes and kill a few hours at a brothel.

And yet as the poem saunters into its closing lines, about department stores stocked with fur coats and camping equipment, we glimpse something else about the spirit of this place: an uneasy detente between ostentatious consumption and reverence for the surrounding landscape, a city bent on re-inventing itself via commerce and the conversations of “mad noontime businessmen.”

This hits hard now, as the city and its people wrangle with the incoming newness involved in the building of lots of new condos and huge high-rises that serve the new and slightly-less-new tech workers that have become a new class here. (We have always been a tech hub, but this condo creep, as I like to call it, is getting a life of its own).  Nor do we want a rotting city center that doesn't try to cover its age, like the one Ginsberg saw.