3.5.15

Despite my copmlaints about social media, it is good at equalizing. Talented, creative, and sometimes famous individuals have profiles and will be "friends" with ordinary ole' folks like me. Sometimes this is nothing more than the novelty, like enjoying George Takei's humor, but some of it can be very beneficial, exciting, and inspiring. 

I have "liked" the Hugo House in Seattle, and get exposed to fantastic writers and events that I wouldn't otherwise have known about. Writers, poets especially I feel, can be somewhat insular, so it's nice to know these events are out there (not that I have attended one yet...oops). 

Martha Silano is teaching a course on "stealing, sampling, absconding" at the Hugo House currently, learning about how to "play" with appropriated text. How fun! She doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, but her blogger profile (another equalizer!!) shows her to be a Seattleite and working in education. She has books published and contributes to online sources as well. Check out her blog--I particularly liked the post about looking back at handwritten drafts of poems. 

Here is the poem that Hugo House's page featured: Song of Weights and Measures. 

For there is a dram.

For there is a farthing.

A bushel for your thoughts.

A hand for your withered heights.

For I have jouled along attempting

to quire and wisp.

For I have sized up a mountain’s meters,

come down jiffy by shake to the tune

of leagues and stones.

For once I was your peckish darling.

For once there was the measure

of what an ox could plow

in a single morning.

For once the fother, the reed, the palm.

For one megalithic year I fixed my gaze

on the smiling meniscus, against the gray wall

of graduated cylinder.

For once I measured ten out of ten

on the scale of pain.

For I knew that soon I’d kiss good-bye

the bovate, the hide and hundredweight.

For in each pinch of salt, a whisper of doubt,

for in each medieval moment, emotion,

like an unruly cough syrup bottle,

uncapped. For though I dutifully swallowed

my banana doses, ascended, from welcome

to lanthorn, three barleycorns at a time,

I could not tackle the trudging, trenchant cart.

For now I am forty rods from your chain and bolt.

For now I am my six-sacked self.

From another source, I also liked this poem, If you could be anybody, Who would you be? Enjoy the richness.

And that’s when she gave him her answer: Hapshepsut, the only female 
pharaoh, who by the luck of her father’s early death managed to rule 

for twenty-two years. Or else, if not her, then the last person who died 
with the secret recipe for embalming bodies, which wine, which incense,

when resin, when honey, when rubbing with grease, which thorny tree 
of the Borage. That’s when she gave him or maybe Thomas Edison 

on the day he invented the phonograph—telegraph tape, set at high speed, 
emitting human speech. Paper speaking! Carbonate, bicarbonate, chloride, 

sodium sulfite, who knows what else. Traveled to distant lands for their henna 
and ochre. That’s when she fessed up: Tanya Harding and Olga Korbut. Also, 

Nadia Comeneci the day she received that perfect score. Also, she told him, 
Botticelli’s Venus. Does it have to be a person, she asked, or could she be 

the pink shell? The creamy cockatiel, the yellow dewlap of the dewlapped lapwing? 
The emu settling down, in the dirt path, for a late-morning nap? In that case, she said, 

I’ll be the light breeze, the glass of wine sweating in the late-June air; actually, 
make that the 638 wineries of Washington State, every one of Klickitat County’s 

turbines slicing the wind through the cottony gospel of cottonwood fluff. 
But she wasn’t only Washington State; she was also a beaver’s persistent teeth. 

Gold, silver, bronze; floor, bars, or beam: who even remembers, and anyway 
she’d rather be the chalk dust lifting after the champion lifts her hand to signal 

she’s ready to vault. Or the moss between the patio bricks; a moose, an alpha wolf, 
a stealth. Nothing camouflaged, nothing too outrageously flamboyant, nothing 

requiring slaughter or stench. I’ve decided, she said, and that’s when she gave him that
impossibly loose-lipped flower, white destined to dirty brown, to flop on the ground 

for the girls to load their buckets for petal soup, cuz who’d give a camellia less 
than a ten, who’d reject a blossom, though why hadn’t she answered nobody 

but nobody else, because really she loved her own aorta, her own prismatic ulnas, 
was most content in her own cage, with the twenty-six bones of her own foot. Not 

platypoid, not tarantula-ized, just a gal sporting a gray-edged halo, just a smidgen spooked by

King Tut’s bulbous belly, his knocking knees, his ghostly glowing teeth.