Monday (A Week Alone) Musings

It was a busy but fun weekend. My sister came in from out of town and we went to the bar, shopping, and a few other local events around town. She left this afternoon and RJ left this morning for Buffalo. He’ll be gone for a week for work, so I have a quiet week and weekend to myself. It seems a little weird to have all this quiet after the excitement of the weekend, but I kind of like it too.
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Let Birds

Eight deer on the slope
in the summer morning mist.
The night sky blue.
Me like a mare let out to pasture.
The Tao does not console me.
I was given the Way
in the milk of childhood.
Breathing it waking and sleeping.
But now there is no amazing smell
of sperm on my thighs,
no spreading it on my stomach
to show pleasure.
I will never give up longing.
I will let my hair stay long.
The rain proclaims these trees,
the trees tell of the sun.
Let birds, let birds.
Let leaf be passion.
Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be
between us. Let joy.
Let entering. Let rage and calm join.
Let quail come.
Let winter impress you. Let spring.
Allow the ocean to wake in you.
Let the mare in the field
in the summer morning mist
make you whinny. Make you come
to the fence and whinny. Let birds.

Linda Gregg
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This was one of the local happenings that we enjoyed this weekend. I bought a cool pair of earrings made from all vintage materials. I also bought a cool little denim pouch that can hold cosmetics. RJ also bought an excellent tie and some fun letter press items. Pictures of earrings and pouch displayed below displayed below.

Monday (And so it begins…)

I’m back from vacation. It was a good break. A lot of travel, a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and a lot of what some people call “quiet time.”

Today was the first day of the 8 week summer term at school. I’m teaching four sections of comp in 8 weeks, so saying it is a marathon isn’t the half of it. This morning was a typical first day morning full of technology malfunctions and unexpected issues. The strangest and most startling event was one of my students having what appeared to be a seizure about an hour and half into my second class. Updates to come.
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Variation on a Sentence

There are a few or no bluish animals…
Thoreau’s Journals, Feb 21, 1855

Of white and tawny, black as ink,
Yellow, and undefined, and pink,
And piebald, there are droves, I think.

(Buff kine in herd, gray whales in pod,
Brown woodchucks, colored like sod,
All creatures from the hand of God.)

And many of a hellish hue;
But, for some reason hard to view,
Earth’s bluish animals are few.

Louise Bogan

At the Cancer Clinic

She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

Ted Kooser

Thursday (Last Day of Classes) Musings

This is the last class day of my spring semester. I’m handing papers back this morning. Tonight, my creative writing students are preforming their 10 minute plays. Friday morning we head to Murray, KY for my graduation and to spend Mother’s Day with my parents.

No Sign of Poet Lost in Japan

The Japanese police said that a weeklong search had not turned up any details on the whereabouts of Craig Arnold, an American poet who has been missing on a Japanese island since last week.
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How a Simile Works

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys
of some city;
and the brickwork back
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise
they’d set me astride, at the “petting zoo”….

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth
the next day;
and the brackish puddles sectioning
the street one morning after a storm….

So poetry configures its comparisons.

My wife and I have been arguing; now
I’m telling her a childhood reminiscence,
stroking her back, her naked back that was
the particles in the heart of a star and will be
again, and is hers, and is like nothing
else, and is like the components of everything.

Albert Goldbarth
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Wednesday (More Rain and Marie Howe)

I read all of Kingdom of Ordinary Time yesterday afternoon. I was sitting in my office and it was on my desk. I couldn’t help myself and before I knew it a good hour and half had passed and I had to leave. Of course, this was the first reading and I’ll go back through the book many times, but this is my favorite poem so far.

Reading Ovid

The thing about the Greeks and Romans is that
at least mythologically,

they could get mad. If the man broke your heart, if he
fucked your sister speechless

then real true hell broke loose:
“You know that stew you just ate for dinner, honey—

It was your son.”
That’s Ovid for you.

A guy who knows how to tell a story about people who
really don’t believe the Golden Rule.

Sometimes I fantasize saying to the man I married, “You know
that hamburger you just

gobbled down with relish and mustard? It was
your truck.”

If only to watch understanding take his face
like the swan-god took the girl.

But rage makes for more rage–nothing to do then but run.
And because rage is a story that has

no ending, we’d both have to transform into birds or fish:
constellations forever fixed

in the starry heavens, forever separated,
forever attached.

Remember the story of Athens and Sparta?
That boy held the fox under his cloak

and didn’t flinch. A cab driver told me the part
I couldn’t remember this morning–

in Sparta he said it was permissible to steal
but not get caught.

The fox bit and scratched; the kid didn’t talk,
and he was a hero.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,
Jesus said. He said The kingdom of heaven

is within you.
And the spiked wheel ploughed through the living centuries

minute by minute, soul by soul. Ploughs still. That’s the good news
and the bad news, isn’t it?

Marie Howe
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Tuesday (Storms) Musings

This is a day for sleep and hot tea.

I received two poetry collections yesterday, Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe and Origami Bridges by Diane Ackerman. I can’t wait to start reading them.

I’m also putting together a few more poetry submissions before summer hits. Let the rejections roll.
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History of Hurricanes

Because we cannot know—

we plant crops, make love in the light of our not-knowing

A Minuteman prods cows from the Green with his musket,
his waxed paper windows snapping in the wind,
stiletto stalks in the herb garden upright—Now

blown sideways—Now weighted down in genuflection,

not toward,

And a frail man holding an Imari teacup paces at daybreak
in his courtyard in Kyoto

a cherry tree petaling the stones pink and slippery
in the weeks he lay feverish

waiting for word from the doctor, checking for signs—Now

in the season of earthenware sturdiness and dependency
it must begin, the season of his recovery

No whirling dervish on the radar, no radar, no brackets
no voices warning—no Voice—fugue of trees, lightning

Because we cannot know, we imagine

What will happen to me without you?

I know some things I remember—

the Delaware River two stories high inside the brick houses
cars floating past Trenton like a regiment on display
brown water climbing our basement stairs two at a time

Like months of remission—
the eye shifts

the waxed paper windows
burst behind the flapping shutters—

and how could he save his child after that calm,
a man who’d never seen a roof sheared off?

Across town the ninth graders in their cutoffs:
Science sucks, they grouse. Stupid history of hurricanes.

No one can remember one;

velocity, storm surge—
abstractions
the earth churns as Isabel rips through Buzzard’s Bay

A hurricane, as one meaning has it:
a large crowded assembly of fashionable people at a private house

The river cannot remember its flooding—

I worry you will forget to check
the watermarks in time

An echo of feet on stone is all the neighbors
knew of their neighbor,
a lover of cherry trees

and of his wife who prayed for him at the shrine,
her hair swept up in his favorite onyx comb

Teresa Cader

Tuesday (Seasonal Relapse) Musings

It is April 21 and we’re expecting light snow flurries today and temperatures in the 40s. Spring is a tease, especially here in Indiana. This weekend it was 70 and sunny, so who knows. I’m hoping in another week the nice weather will come to stay.
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The Luxury of Hesitation (excerpt from The Proof from Motion)

things
forgotten
I could

burn in hell forever

set the glass
down, our
emotion’s moment

eyes vs sunlight

how removed
here, from
here

towards the unfamiliar and

frankincense forests
against the discerning light

everybody
sudden

frightful indeed, the sound of
traffic and
no appetite

the crowd

I would like to be
beautiful when
written

Keith Waldrop
*Courtesy of the Academy of American Poetry for National Poetry Month.

The final two lines of this poem are why I decided to post it. Wonderful.
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Monday Musings

Transit of Venus

The actors mill about the party saying rhubarb
because other words do not sound like conversation.
In the kitchen, always, one who’s just discovered
beauty, his mouth full of whiskey and strawberries.
He practices the texture of her hair with his tongue;
in her, five billion electrons pop their atoms. Rhubarb
in electromagnetic loops, rhubarb, rhubarb, the din increases.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
*Courtesy of the Academy of American Poetry for National Poetry Month
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I’m in the process of putting an book order in on Amazon. I know. I don’t need anymore books, but I’ve almost made my way through the “shelf” that was gathering dust, so I feel it is time to replenish. I just added The Writer’s Notebook put out by Tin House that is featured in this article in the NY Times:

One of the biggest growth areas in higher education these days is creative writing. In 1975, there were 52 degree-granting writing programs in American colleges and universities, and in 2004 there were more than 300. In his new book, “The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing,” Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that for this to happen in an era when American education has generally become more practical and vocational is not quite as odd as it seems.

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Collage

Galileo’s Daughter signed by Dava Sobel

The 2009 issue of New Voices. This is the yearly literary magazine put out by my community college, and I helped copy edit the final proofs.

Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens. I bought it today at out local independent music store, Luna. Today celebrated independent music stores across the country.

RJ’s birthday present. He went to Don’s Guns and shot a .37 magnum.
He gave me one of the shells.

The winners of the 2009 Poetry Contest.

Friday (Writing, Reading, and New Shoes) Musings

I spent most of today reading and writing. I finished Dana Levin’s Wedding (comments to come later), read half of the Translation issue of Poetry, and started leafing through Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius. I also wrote a poem and started on two others. It was a good day.

I picked up Ordinary Genius at AWP, where Addonizio seemed to be all over the place. In retrospect I think I may have seen her in the elevator. I’ve read a smattering of her poems online and in different journals. Her poems have grit and I like how she uses pop culture references. I was also given a cd of hers when I bought the book, and it’s pretty interesting. Anyway. I’m always looking for writing exercises, because unlike some poets, I don’t always sit down with a clear idea of what I want to write about. Also, I’m a teacher, so writing exercises are invaluable to my students. In the first part of the book, Addonizio gives solid, and familiar advice to first time writers. She mentions keeping a “book” (journal) and making time to write and how comittment is vital. She’s absolutely right, so it makes sense that I felt like I was being reprimanded while reading her words. I need to get back to what I was doing a few months ago, which was setting aside half an hour each day to write something. It didn’t matter if the poem failed or was complete crap. I just needed to keep the gears grinding. So beginning this week, I’m getting right back to it.
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This is one of the translated poems (Dutch in this case) from the April issue of Poetry that I really liked:

Last Night

Saved two children last night.
They lay under thin black ice
one gone blue, the other grey.
I laid them out on grass
that snapped under my step
wrung their bodies warm and dry
gave them the gust of my breath.

Then I looked out at the morning
that lay lukewarm on the water
put on a tank top
arranged some grasses in a vase
fished two children out of sleep.
Hester Knibbe

Thursday (Onward) Musings

Today is a new day and I’m feeling better. One of the good things about my mood swings is that they don’t last very long, especially when it comes to my work. Quit writing? Who am I kidding. I might as well quit thinking all together and that isn’t an option. I received another rejection letter yesterday afternoon, but there was a note urging me to send to this publication again, so that’s encouraging. Rejections don’t discourage me as much as they used to. It’s just part of the deal. At this point, I have nine publications and one contest to hear back from. I’m sure they’ll start rolling in relatively soon. Production on the spring issues will begin shortly, so content decisions need to be made (it’s useful having been on staff for a couple of journals). Tomorrow, I’m getting up early, working out and then heading somewhere to write. I don’t have anywhere to be until 2, so the morning is mine.
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Children in a Field

They don’t wade in so much as they are taken.
Deep in the day, in the deep of the field,
every current in the grasses whispers hurry
hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume
like a rumor, impelling them further on.
It is the way of girls. It is the sway
of their dresses in the summer trance-
light, their bare calves already far-gone
in green. What songs will they follow?
Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm
or harm the border promises, whatever
calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless
through the high grass and into the willow-
blur, traceless across the lean blue glint
of the river, to the long dark bodies
of the conifers, and over the welcoming
threshold of nightfall.

Angela Shaw