Wait! I Have a Blog?!

Out of a fog...

2012-02-02T11:27:00.000-06:00

...into a room perpendicular with pianos. It's fun to be on Poetry Radio, a local WGLT program that you can hear live, stream, or click to hear via podcast. I am up today with "Two Pianos," published in Drought some years back, and based on the fact of two pianos in our dining room for a time in my life.

It's also an eerie sort of fun to drive, slowly, through a thick fog in the morning, as I did, safely, today! Now: blue sky, sun shining, and 31 but expected to be in the mid-50s later. Maybe I'll take a long, leisurely walk.

And, technology challenged as I am, I managed to download and install a new, free security program for my computer today. Yay! My son advised me, and I followed his advice. And he is coming home for a visit this weekend, so if I screwed anything up, he can fix it!

Happy Groundhog's Day. The fog prevented the shadow. The sun foreshadows...eh?...the spring!

After the Sheep

2012-02-01T09:41:00.001-06:00

Sending you to another interview today, this one full of the magic and wisdom of Sherry O'Keefe, poet, editor, viola player, and sometime sheep shearer.

I was struck by this:

After the sheep are sheared, they run about the barnyard a little bit shocked and startled. Not so much because of what happened to them, but because of what happened to the others! Until they run around and smell each other, they no longer recognize any other sheep.

I can't help but make a human connection, of a spiritual or emotional or psychological sort. When we are naked and vulnerable together, shorn of our protective covering, yes, we don't know who we are! But this is us! The real us, the old us, and the new us. And we are finally focused on each other! By necessity! To know who we are collectively, to figure ourselves out individually.

And running around smelling each other somehow seems perfect for the Hump of the Week in the blog.

You can read some of Sherry O'Keefe's poems here, and her blog, here. I think her Making Good Use of August chapbook must be sold out at Finishing Line Press, as the link doesn't work, so contact her through her blog, if you want to get hold of that.

The fabulous art here, at the interview, and in Sherry O'Keefe's solo poetry feature is by Escape Into Life artist Michal Geidrojc.

Whimsy-Colored Glasses

2012-01-31T07:51:00.000-06:00

Today is a busy Fat Tuesday in the blog: exercise class, ekphrasis class, housecleaning, hosting of book group tonight. So, mainly, I will link you to an interview in Adanna Journal, where I talk about poetry, seriously but through the lenses of my whimsy-colored glasses.

Roughly the rosy, pinky, orange of this morning's sunrise.

By whimsy, I mean you'll find the occasional musical-comedy lyric + my kids rolling their eyes. By "seriously" I mean, I do try to answer the real questions about poetry, poetry process, avoiding sentimentality, and being all that you can be in the army of women writers in the world. And, as the genie reminds Aladdin when he's trying to talk to Jasmine ("Bee yourself," in the guise of a bee), I try to bee myself.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

--Emily Dickinson

Stoic Kindness

2012-01-30T09:48:00.001-06:00

Yesterday my mom brought the new issue of Poetry East to our Sunday afternoon poetry workshop. It's the Fall 2011 issue, Numbers 71, 72, & 73, containing art by Odilon Redon, and writing by George Herbert and Nathaniel Hawthorne, along with a whole bunch of contemporary poets, including my mom!

Her poem, "Tact," by Margaret Kirk, is on page 103. It was inspired by an incident in the McLean Museum of History, but it is the kind of thing any of us might have witnessed somewhere or had to handle ourselves, which, as my mom puts it, takes "stoic kindness."

She is my poetry "student" now, but I first learned about poetry from her, not to mention everything I know about stoic kindness. Thanks, Mom! And congratulations!

An extra delight is that a poem by Patricia McMillen, "Running Wild," is a couple pages away, and there's this poetry friend from Chicago running wild as a child (and a horse) in her front yard and in her imagination, becoming "a whole herd."

Further on, the poignant "Too Late," by Barry Silesky, a poetry friend and mentor. I learned about prose poetry from Barry. Favorites Michael Hettich and Lee Rossi are in there. Oh, and many more. I've only had the issue a few hours! There's a lot in it.

And my mom!

And that's my mom at Heartland Theatre, looking stoically kind in the play Eleemosynary, which means benevolence.

Going to Heaven

2012-01-29T09:00:00.000-06:00

Today I was smacked in the head and chest by Emily Dickinson's poem on The Writer's Almanac, titled there as "Going to Heaven." Don't ever think she's sappy. She isn't. Wait till you get to stanza three.

Likewise, smacked by a quotation from Anton Chekhov, who had been praised in a letter that also challenged him to take his writing more seriously. "Your letter struck me like lightning. I became very emotional upon opening it. I nearly cried. I understand now that if I have a gift, I should honor it, which I have not always done in the past." I nearly cried, too, on reading this! Again, not sappy. Serious! Takes courage to do that. And, the Almanac reports, as he became more monetarily successful as a writer, he kept up his doctoring, providing free medical care to the poor. I like that guy.

To make it a Random Coinciday as well as a Poetry Someday in the blog, I was just discussing an excellent production of Three Sisters with an actor last night, in the green room of a Gala event for the McLean County Chamber of Commerce. Yes, a glorious combination of business people and creative people; sometimes the twain shall meet! (And, no doubt, great businesses have plenty of creativity; and great artists, even those without good business sense, figure out how to get the job done!)

RE: Gala. Actors recreated business people from McLean County's past for the business people of McLean County's present, who were receiving the annual Chamber of Commerce Awards. Ruth Steele, who appeared in the wonderful Mitsubishi commercial that made Normal, Illinois famous, was there to speak, and great fun was had by all. I was glad to be a part of it and to join the business community for cordials in the after party.

RE: Three Sisters. A marvelous collaboration of the MFA program at Illinois State University and Heartland Theatre, where the play was performed, directed by Sandi Zielinski. The production itself was both moving and funny, as Chekhov should be, but I was also powerfully moved between acts, as the actors, in character, rolled up rugs and moved furniture to change the scenes. It was part of the change of household going on in the play. Terrific!

Yesterday, I left the house at 11:15 a.m. and returned at 11:15 p.m.--yep, actors work hard. So it was not a Slattern Day. Hence, today is not a church day but a work day: all the laundry, all the dishes, a chicken soup to prepare, plus two poetry class preps. Does this mean I am not going to heaven? (Or that I am!)

Into Adieu

2012-01-28T07:17:00.000-06:00

Google this morning has the animated image of a cow lowing at a giant snowflake, and, indeed, we woke up here to more snow.

(This giant micro-snowflake is thanks to Michael/artgeek via Wikipedia.)

And sometime yesterday a loop of Shakespearean punning began to play in my head:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

I've been told that "solid flesh" can be interpreted as a pun on "sullied flesh," since it can be heard as such, and Hamlet's soliloquy was heard by its audiences, not read, at that time, and because it fits his own feelings of being sullied by recent events (his mother's quick re-marriage to his uncle after his father's death in suspicious circumstances that turn out to be murder) and his own despair.

"Sullied flesh" seems an appropriate pun to pursue on Slattern Day in the blog.

Likewise, "a dew" can resonate as "adieu," since Hamlet is contemplating a farewell to the earth.

O, that this too too recent snow would melt
Thaw, and resolve itself into adieu.

Flexible Folk

2012-01-27T12:28:00.000-06:00

Happy 20 years of Acousticity to this guy, Bruce Bergethon, whose "flexible folk" program is on WGLT (and has been for 20 years...!)

He's also the producer of Poetry Radio, co-hosted by Kirstin Hotelling Zona, where you can listen to poets read their own poems or favorites by others, accompanied by snippets of music, on the radio or via podcast!

I just spent the morning taping some poems with him, including some from the forthcoming Nocturnes!

Bruce is the guy who introduced me, via his Sunday night program, to the CD Eddi Reader Sings the Songs of Robert Burns, by playing the thrilling "Jamie, Come Try Me." It's one of my 3 favorites on the survey you take on this Acousticity page (refesh if it doesn't show up on the first try). You could win a guitar pick.

Offer Your Art Up to the Whole World

2012-01-26T07:58:00.000-06:00

As if to contribute to yesterday's discussion on asking the most basic questions about art, Lucinda Williams says this, "Above all, the listener should be able to understand the poem or the song, not be forced to unravel a complicated, self-indulgent puzzle. Offer your art up to the whole world, not just an elite few." It's her birthday, that fact and this quotation thanks to The Writer's Almanac. Thanks to Wikipedia and Creative Commons for Lucinda with her guitar.

Of course, Lucinda's music and lyrics are right out there, raw and repetitive (in the way refrains are, so we can sing along and really feel it), her heart offered up to the world. Her dad is the poet Miller Williams, and I got to hear them together in a program of the Poetry Center at the Art Institute of Chicago once! Great evening.

But her country-music out-thereness is not for everybody. And I don't mind unraveling...a braid, or putting together a puzzle, if I see that the unraveling frees the wild mane or the jigsaw diligence reveals the whole with my participation, and if there is something of interest available right away. So it is still a matter of balance. We can be available and accessible as artists and still offer a reasonable challenge.

If we are seeing something new, that's what we want to show, yes? If we are feeling something intensely that we sense is probably a shared feeling, we want to communicate our experience, not just express a feeling (the self-indulgence Lucinda warns against).

Oh, I know that English departments have broken off from Communications departments on just this issue, with Communications identified with delivering information for some specific purpose (advertising or public relations, journalism or broadcast journalism, etc.). But what I mean is that when I read or write a poem, I am hoping to commune with someone in some way!

Uh, and it's not "an elite few," really, I hope, but it is an intimate communion with each member of the community I find there. Let us share this moment together, whoever we are, via the tangible poem or song and the intangible experience created by it.

Cold Enough to Cry

2012-01-25T08:18:00.000-06:00

It's not that cold here today, but it could be, and has been. No, I am quoting from the poem "Snow, the Lane Home," by Angie Macri, up now in her feature at Escape Into Life. Don't worry, you won't stay cold. The seasons change in her poems, and in the photos by Mahbubur Rahman, which also offer a different geography and terrain, other waters.

The sky is a diffuse cloudy blue-gray here today, and the tall wheat-colored prairie grasses in the ditches are coated with frost. But it's above freezing, and tomorrow it'll go into the 40s, and I may take a long walk into town to the post office to mail a letter to Switzerland. I give myself reasons.

Today I'm still thinking about that desire in us, as writers or as visual artists, to let the work speak for itself. We don't want to have to explain or interpret. But in what ways can we help listeners at a reading, or viewers at an opening or "art talk," perceive the offered works? What little bit of context will ready the hearer for the poem? Or what interesting question can get a viewer looking more closely at a painting or photograph, or seeing something s/he didn't see before?

Is your first impression here of one tree, or of two? Is this a new tree growing from the roots of the old, dead tree? Or is this a young, vibrant tree that sucked up what the old tree needed, killing it? What is it about the rest of the photograph that provides evidence to support you in either impression? Or a third impression?

These are the kinds of simple, natural questions that I like to ask about what I am seeing. It doesn't bother me if someone thinks I am simple, as I know myself to have a side-by-side sophisticated awareness of various things, or the ability to research what I don't know, etc. It doesn't bother me if the photographer turns out to be more interested in how he manipulated light or color, or if the painter is more interested in texture and composition. When I write a poem, I, too, am aware of some formal things going on that are essentially invisible to many readers. As they should be!

But truly, if I look at two trunks in the foreground, I am going to ask the simplest questions about what I am seeing, and wonder why the artist pursued that particular subject matter. My simple questions will cause me to pay attention, look closely, and start to see new things.

I see here a road somewhat traveled. I imagine I will keep walking and won't sit down on that bench.

Free Food

2012-01-24T07:35:00.000-06:00

It's double class day again: exercise class followed by ekphrasis class. So we might consider it a nonfat Fat Tuesday of abundance in the blog. Yes, we will! Represented by the Free Stock food image of cabbages, everybody's favorite fat-free food. (Hold the slaw dressing.) I can't show you the Edward Hopper paintings I'll refer to in class today, because he's not in the public domain, and I don't have permission.

But we'll have plenty of art to look at in the McLean County Arts Center, and I got to go the opening for the 3 shows now up this past Friday. Colorful imaginary landscapes by John Cassidy in the small gallery, and photographs in the large gallery by Jin Lee (Great Waters series) and Rhondal McKinney (Illinois Landscapes). Got to hear a double art talk by the last two, so more abundance.

I find a particular pleasure in the pairing of Lee and McKinney as all the photographs are bisected horizontally by the horizon, making me stand there and contemplate it in peace, as I do in life.

And another particular delight in looking at wild color and motion muted by soft pastel in the work of Cassidy. It all makes me meditate on the interplay of motive, technique, and effect in visual art as compared to literary art!

Not to mention the particular irony of an "art talk" by people who would prefer not to talk about their art and/or who wish, as Jin Lee put it, "to circumvent language." So now, I will simply contemplate cabbages. And nonfat, high-iron dried apricots.

In Praise, Again

2012-01-23T11:23:00.000-06:00

The last couple blog entries have been in praise of The Sun magazine and of the wisdom of people around me, and here's some more of that, and more praise for the fine writer Joe Wilkins, whose work I first found in The Sun! While I know him as a poet, the current (January) issue has his beautiful essay, "Bruised," in it. You can read an excerpt here.

Here is his poetry feature (with scary art) at Escape Into Life, and here is my mini-review of his new book Killing the Murnion Dogs. You can find the book here, at Black Lawrence Press, or here, at Powell's. (I'm sure you can find it elsewhere, too!)

And this (not scary) art brings back a couple of familiar birds, from Pamela Callahan.

No sun here today, and thunder and lightning last night!

Tangled Nets

2012-01-22T18:53:00.000-06:00

This morning I had just been looking at a poem I've been revising for months (OK, years), printing it out to get some feedback on it later this week. It has the ocean in it, "a slipper silver as a fish," and a fishing net.

So what's the reflection about when I get to church? Fishing nets. All right, dropping them to follow the big guy. But enough to make it a Random Coinciday!

Pastor Bob was interested in what would make you drop everything and start a new adventure, and, specifically, what would you need to give up to do so.

This was not leading to an easy equation, nor a conventional platitude: to win big you have to take a big risk, etc. This was a suggestion that we might have to give up a sense of identity. When Simon and Andrew left off fishing, they were leaving a way of life. When James and John stopped mending their nets, they were leaving a family business:

We can safely suppose there were sacrifices involved--psychological ones as well as material, having to leave behind not only their livelihood but something of their self-understanding, too.

If I've thought of myself one way, how do I think of myself a different way in order to grow or try something new? And it might not be the positives I am leaving behind but the negatives. As Bob put it:

But we don't pay as much attention to ideas and attitudes that keep us from more creative and satisfying possibilities. For instance, what about self doubt? What about resentments and grudges? What about taking responsibility for problems that belong to others? What about the need to please someone who'll never give their approval? What if some of our mental baggage amounted to the fishing nets those first disciples walked away from to promote a more optimistic and worthwhile agenda for our neighbors and family and friends?

Yes, the nets could well be seen as entanglements, or things we hold onto that can drag us down into the swirling depths, or even drown us. It's hard to swim tangled in a net or lugging a lot of mental baggage.

So this is something I'll be thinking about for a while and hoping to implement. I realized I could report in church today that I had been a good goatherd this week! A guy who could have gotten my goat didn't. I let him talk and let it go. I suppose it could be said that I did not take any responsibility for his problem! He gets to do that! (Poor him.)

Meanwhile, I had some poem acceptances this week, including a poem called "Grudge." I'm not sure what to make of that.

Spiritual Midwifery

2012-01-21T17:53:00.001-06:00

I could say I am late in posting because it's Slattern Day in the blog, but the truth is I've been at a volleyball tournament all day, watching beautiful, healthy, athletic young woman of all shapes and sizes smash the heck out of a volleyball. Between sets and matches, I was reading an interview in The Sun--oh, how I love The Sun! thank you, Kim J Kimmel for that gift subscription!--with Ina May Gaskin, author of Birth Matters and the book that rocked my pregnant world, Spiritual Midwifery.

This makes it a Random Coinciday in the blog, as well, since my recent finalist chapbook manuscript (over at Comstock Review) is also titled Spiritual Midwifery, in honor of that book, and contains a poem titled "Spiritual Midwifery" about a sad childbirth (that also stands for several losses in lives close to mine) that prepared me to accept what might go wrong at my own labor and also served as the contrast deepening my joy at my own wonderful luck.

I seldom read this poem aloud at public readings, but whenever I do, it releases something in someone who lets me know. And thanks me. So I am moved, grateful, and reluctant to read it in public again, lest someone be unprepared to revisit a sad moment, but I shouldn't be, right? They are glad to know someone realizes, and cares. Dilemma.

The interview in The Sun is powerful, reminding us that the mortality rate for mothers is rising in the USA, where many do not have access to midwives and doulas, and is very low in countries that do. I was surprised to learn that 100% of women in Germany have access a midwife because "there's a law that a midwife must be present." Here, doctors are no longer even instructed on how to handle a vaginal breech birth and routinely do a caesarian. Etc.

Part of what surprised me was the lessening of awareness that natural childbirth, aided by midwives or doulas, is a wonderful way to have a baby. My son is 21 years old, and somehow I thought we'd have progressed in this...return to the older, natural, woman-centered ways...but no. Gaskin points out three main ways to have a baby in America: planned home birth with a professional midwife, hospital setting with a certified nurse-midwife (and doctor handy if needed), and hospital setting with a doctor and nurses.

I had both my babies with certified nurse midwives in a hospital, no pain meds, which was right for me, and all was well. If my daughter chooses and is able to have a baby, she will probably need to be in a hospital setting, as well, and I am glad of our medical knowledge today, and glad of the midwives who understand that love, encouragement, and support are crucial.

Also on my wishlist is Home/Birth: a poemic, by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker. Maybe I'll have read it by the time I can hand it down to my daughter!

The Sun's cover photo is by Corey Hendrickson.

Boxed Melon

2012-01-20T11:47:00.000-06:00

Oh, glory! A reminder of summer on this bitter, windy winter day with a frozen pipe in the upstairs bathroom.
We're hoping it doesn't break.

Yes, this is the latest box of notecards from Jonathan Koch!

And I think this is the last day of the chapbook sale at Hyacinth Girl Press, where one of the choices is my forthcoming Nocturnes. Here's another brief nocturnal example:

Cucuyo

Havana at night:
ladies with lace nets of light,
beetles in their hair.

That one was first published in Blink, a tiny magazine for tiny poems. Women really did put glow-in-the-dark beetles in their hair as adornments! Happy weekend.

Interruptions

2012-01-19T10:15:00.001-06:00

A ~~woman's~~ ~~mother's~~ ~~poet's~~ ~~artist's~~ ~~editor's~~ person's life can have many interruptions, and so can the Internet. Yesterday I interrupted my usual blog content (which is--? unusual?) with a Blog Blackout to help raise awareness of Internet censorship and piracy issues, and to give myself and others a chance to learn a bit more by way of a few fun links.

And to join Wikipedia, the people's encyclopedia, in solidarity!

Since my first job was an as encyclopedia editor and staff writer, back in the days of print, I am also aware of the complexities of a people-written information source, believe you me! I know the Facts-On-File fact-checking we did as a staff to keep information accurate, objective, and up-to-date, and we hired experts in the field to write the appropriate in-depth articles. And as a college teacher, I required students to use regular and scholarly sources like journals and databases, where the information is reviewed and double-checked, and also to "know your source" or the slant of the particular journal or writer, as needed. Etc.! But I do love Wikipedia as a quick, fun, and easy place to get an overview, crucial details, and links to other sources, a starting place to see what you're going to have to find out and confirm. It's also a wonderful collaboration of information-sharing people. Thank you, Wikipeople!

Speaking of collaboration--and interruption--I refer you today to Collaboruptions (made up word), a mini-review of Interruptions, collaborative poems by Jessy Randall and Daniel M. Shapiro, an article I posted yesterday in the Escape Into Life blog. It is a fun and funny book that demonstrates poets interrupting each other as a way of writing, and, yes, collaborating with the mysteries of the universe in surprisingly accessible language. Or vice versa.

Eh? Speaking of...I don't know what--mysteries of the universe!--, are any of you having trouble commenting on the blog these days, or even seeing the comments of others? Hmm, how would you let me know? I ask because my friend Kim J. Kimmel is having such trouble, and I don't know 1) the reason or 2) how to solve it. I see that the new "Reply" function creates a text box that requires you to scroll down to find the place to type in the verification word if you want to comment, and I had to click around a bit to figure out how to comment on someone else's blog, so I suggest 1) patience and 2) clicking around until Blogger figures out...a fix.

Blog Blackout

2012-01-18T06:58:00.000-06:00

Like The Bloggess, I'm not tech savvy enough to actually black out the blog (and be able to retrieve it from blackness tomorrow), so here's some info:

Darth Vader on youtube

Google's black box

How to SOPA strike if you 1) can read instructions and 2) are not technology challenged

Reuters saying Facebook, etc. did not join in

Adrian Hon explains the complexity & international ramifications with a page from the Gutenberg bible

A survival guide to today

Wikipedia today

I love you, Wikipedia.

Nocturne: Blue and Silver

2012-01-17T15:09:00.000-06:00

Misty & gray, windy, with the temperature expected to drop from the 40s, when I went out this morning to exercise class, to 13 by tonight. It's a Fat Tuesday of general abundance disguised as a Blue Monday.

I started teaching a class in ekphrasis this morning, too, and it's fun to be both learning & teaching--exercising muscles, joints, and brain, encouraging full range of motion in all ways.

Came home to find A Wicked Apple, by Susan Slaviero, in my mailbox, and the chapbook sale is still going on at Hyacinth Girl Press, if you want to get 2 for $9! My very-forthcoming Nocturnes is one of the options.

Here's one of the "night songs" from it:

Nocturne

--James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne—Blue and Silver: CremorneLights (1872)

No one noticed my shy shift to joy
as the lights came on in the bay.

The water reeds were characters
of an ineffable alphabet.

I switched from show tunes to Chopin,
floating on the blues.

I wrote my last testament,
left my estate to nuthatch and finch.

Blue Hills and Citrus Dreams

2012-01-16T12:18:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I got to hear this reflection on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech on his actual birthday, and to serve cupcakes to my mom (at our poetry workshop) on her actual birthday.

The reflection ends with Wendell Berry's wonderful "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," for all you local food and back-to-the-earthers! And then we were invited to offer a one-sentence "dream" we might include in our own manifestos. Some of those are in the comments section, and you can leave one of your own, if you like, and if you will sign your name to it. Do you have a dream?

In poetry news, the beginning-of-the-year rejections are rolling in, along with various bits of good news, and new poems are creeping out from the smoke of the smudge pots. I was not a winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest, but I was a Special Merit finalist (back to being a bridesmaid for me!), and have 2 poems forthcoming in anniversary issues of the Comstock Review.

I can't help but be glad for the winner, Lucinda Grey, and look forward to receiving her winning chapbook The Blue Hills: Poems After the Life of Maud Gonne, which sounds intriguing, Yeatsian, historical, and actressy, all coincidences of the sort I like. I do appreciate it when contest entrants receive the winning book.

And how wonderful that Jonathan Koch is now offering some of his gorgeous art on notecards! See them and get them in his Store!

You Say Libero, I Say Libero

2012-01-15T09:07:00.000-06:00

In volleyball news, the teen club season has begun, and I got to see my daughter play again yesterday. She is the libero, a back row player who can come in for two other players without a special moment at the line with the referee to handle the substitution. It makes for swifter play.

At high levels of competition, there is a "libero tracker" to make sure these entrances and exits are all in order. The position of libero started in international play, and went to the clubs and colleges before it went to the schools, filtering down from high schools to junior high, but soon it will be pretty standard.

It is pronounced LEE-burr-o, evidently from the Romance languages and related to being a "free" substitution player. Around here, people say Luh-BEAR-o, as nobody knew how to pronounce it when it first arrived. So, either is correct, but, given the accents, you can't really sing it to "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," by George and Ira Gershwin, from Shall We Dance. "You say potato, I say potato...You like tomatoes, I like tomatoes..."

My daughter is playing in Peoria today (theatre joke), where my husband was coaching a younger club team yesterday. He's there with her, to watch, and then has to turn around and come back to coach his team at the local club. This extra driving could have been avoided if I were not part of the 50%. Yes, really, as a team (marriage, family, American citizenry), we are part of the 99%, not the rich 1%, but in the scheme of things, I am part of the vast majority of women whose husbands only listen to 50% of what they say. As in, "Do you have to go to Peoria tomorrow? Because, if not, she can get a ride with a teammate. She has to be there at 9:00 a.m."

"I have to be there at 11:00."

"Do you want to take her and see her play before you have to start coaching?"

"Yes, I can do that." Etc.

Suddenly, this morning, my husband realized he had to drive to Peoria.

Shall we dance?

Scatterbrained Hathead

2012-01-14T10:03:00.000-06:00

Why is my hair so flat these days? Why is my brain so scattered? Answer: it got cold, I'm wearing a hat all the time, but hats don't actually hold together the thoughts in your brain, and it's the new year, with lots of new starts and necessary organizing. I'm doing all the to-do lists, the housecleaning, the class preparations, the 2012 submissions, etc. I'm getting a lot done. It does not help.

My brain is scattered, it's disappearing in a mist, and it's growing green fuzz.

Oh, thank you, Jonathan Koch, for this Study of an Oak Tree, on a Slattern Day in the blog.

13 on the 13th

2012-01-13T08:56:00.000-06:00

When I woke up this (Friday the 13th) morning, it was 11 degrees. I let my husband drive our daughter to school on the somewhat slippery roads and headed out for round 2 of major shoveling. Round 1 was yesterday, but it kept snowing. The temperature went up to 12 degrees.

I was plenty bundled up for the job, as I kept my jammies on under my jeans, wore two scarves around my neck, hat and gloves, the thick, non-slippery gloves good for driving and shoveling, and only the tips of my fingers felt cold. Now I am waiting for the temperature to rise one more degree, so I can post this as "13 on the 13th."

But in case it remains at 12, I offer this list of Literary Waterways--literary journals with some kind of water, body of water, or liquid in their name. I'm sure there are more, but here are 13:

Bayou Magazine
Big Muddy
Crab Creek Review
The Fourth River
Gulf Coast
Literary Juice
River Styx
River Teeth
Sleet Review
Spoon River Poetry Review
2River Review
Water Stone Review
Willow Springs

Also, it's Lorrie Moore's birthday, a hilarious short story writer. I have here her book A Gate at the Stairs, retrieved for free from the library sale, on that day after the last day when they want you just to take stuff so they don't have to move it elsewhere, to read some day. Hey, I'm interested in the similarity of shape and arrangement of cover images on these two books, this one:

and the one I'm currently reading: Saving Fish from Drowning, by Amy Tan (above). I am 1/3 of the way through and have crossed the border into Burma and reached the passage that explains the phrase "saving fish from drowning."

They get stuck in literary waterways.

Winter

2012-01-12T12:46:00.000-06:00

Winter has arrived, the first snow-storm of the season. According to the local paper, January 12 has quite a "history of bad weather," and I was in town for some of it. I remember the floods, the flooded office, tearing up the carpet, moving my office furniture upstairs, writing in front of the unfinished fireplace (separate story, house fire) draped with blankets to keep out the cold, installing the trench and sump pump, etc. Sigh... Anyhoo, so far, so good, but there are some area cancellations, early dismissals, and so on. It was an icky morning, and somewhere a Humvee fell over, but no one was seriously hurt. I'm glad and lucky to be somewhere warm, and I hope you are, too.

Here's Tori Amos as a snow angel.

Mooning Again

2012-01-11T09:23:00.002-06:00

Early this morning I put up a new poetry feature at Escape Into Life--funny, sweet, surreal poems by Scott Poole, with wild and wonderful paintings (like this one!) by Masakatsu Sashie. It was a late-start morning at school, so when I drove my daughter to school the recently-full moon was in a different place in the sky, higher, a faint globe of white hanging in the blue among white clouds. I thought I was done with the goatcheese moon, but I'm not. I'll never be done with the moon.

I don't know how to credit these marvelous moon-shots that have been going around Facebook. If you know who took these photos, please credit the photographer in the comments! I am charmed by them.

And Ren Powell posted a link to this great article on stress in Wired. It's fascinating, explains so much, and rings so true. I agree that stress damages and kills us, and I'm glad that scientists are paying attention to that.

I'd say my concern (beyond all the bad human and bad baboon behavior) is that the scientists see the "cure" as a vaccine, and see that as getting to the source, while I see that as still addressing the symptoms by attempting to prevent them in advance, with a drug.

I'd like to see us pay attention to the root causes of stress, and attempt to solve those in global & societal ways, in a shift of attitudes, and/or using a combination of natural and organic ways...but that's complicated and takes hard, patient, diligent, cooperative work. A vaccine is easier.

Oh, you'll see. The article has all kinds of social, economic, and political pertinence, as well as the science and health aspects, and is funny and a smooth read. Long, but if you are patient and stick with it, you will learn a lot and win the Be a Better Baboon Award.

***

Update, with info from Susan Elbe! Thank you, Susan. The moon photos are by Laurent Laveder, and you can see more and get some at his website, here!

The Lonely Goatherd Award

2012-01-10T12:45:00.000-06:00

If you are just now joining the discussion of goats and goatherds, you might want to read yester-day's post. Today I would like to give Kristin Berkey-Abbott not only the Random Coinciday Award, which she requested, but also the Got Me Giggling Award, the Not a Good Goatherd Award, and the coveted Lonely Goatherd Award. The prize is not this sweatshirt. (But you can get your own goatherd shirt at Zazzle!)

Nancy Ruder, aka Collagemama, receives both the I'm My Own Grandpa and the I'm My Own Goatherd awards.

And Bob Ryder, of Pawsitive Transformations, receives the Herding Your Own Goat Award, the I'm My Own Pastor Award, the I'll Train Your Goat Award, the I Got My Own Goat Award, and the I've Got Your Goatherd's Back Award.

I saw the full white round goatcheese of a moon this morning, and that's enough of that.

Big Fat Moon, Married Love, and a Goatherd

2012-01-09T10:32:00.000-06:00

OK, it took all my concentration this morning to be a safe driver, once I'd seen that big fat full moon hovering on the horizon. I pointed it out, over my left shoulder, to my daughter, as we turned right, or east, toward her school, and then I chose the route home that would let me drive safely west, straight at it, watching it elongate (become more oblong than round), drop, and disappear. This happened rather quickly, on a stretch of rough road that takes me by the home of Chris Al-Asad (founding editor of Escape Into Life), as part of the moon's appearance in the morning at this time of year, I hear, is illusory. It's there and not there, visible through refraction? That is, illusory at the moment of sun coming up on one horizon and moon going down on the other horizon. Tonight, look up! Tomorrow morning, arrange the routine to see as much of that moon as I can!

I also realized this morning that I'd come round in the Poetry Radio rotation again last night. Alas, I missed the cool 20-years-of-Acousticity show, with Allison Krauss as a teenager! You can hear the poem if you want, "Married Love," as a podcast, or read it in the Love Poems issue of Poetry East, #53, which you can find here. It's also in my chapbook Broken Sonnets, as it is a "broken" (and unrhyming) sonnet about an "unbroken" (sometimes, OK, often rhyming) marriage.

And I am my own goatherd, I hope, thanks to this fine reflection by Bob Ryder, in the Reflecting Pool. Bob was reminding us at church yesterday of the vigilance it takes to remain nonviolent in life, down to not letting someone "get our goat"--that is, not letting someone provoke us into being cranky and irritable in our own actions and speech.

Bob told about a job interview, and a boss's warning about a certain manager:

“This guy seems to know how to get a person's goat,” he explained.

“No worries.” I countered, “I’ll leave my goat at home.”

Heh heh. Bob then confessed to his own failure to leave his goat at home, and I have been known to be cranky and irritable in response to the bad behavior of others or to actual or perceived insult, offense, or injustice, so this was a good goat's heads-up for me. (Also, I had been craving drunken goat cheese on the walk to church, but that's another story, and a great excuse for the drunken goat cheese illustration again!) While I did not speak into the microphone at church about it, I had a little epiphany! I had just run into a guy who not only gets my goat but resembles a goat! And I was gentle with him, said happy new year, and wished him well. I wasn't letting him off the hook, er, the shepherd's hook(!), but I was letting him be his own goatherd, as I'm not interested in that job.

Thanks, once again, to Jonathan Koch for the watermelon, which is neither goat nor moon.

Heaven and Hell

2012-01-08T08:01:00.000-06:00

Well, it's Sunday, so today's long walk will be to church and back, where I may or may not ponder Heaven and Hell. (We reflect on a wide variety of things at my particular church but seldom that.)

But I invite you to ponder Heaven and Hell via these poems, compiled by poet and poetry editor John Guzlowski, in the new issue of The Scream Online. John asked me (at Facebook!) to help spread the word, so I hope it's OK to do this way, including the photo by Richard Beban, also a poet!

First up in this issue is Kirstin Berkey-Abbott's wonderful poem "Heaven on Earth," which begins, "I saw Jesus at the bowling alley, / slinging nothing but gutter balls." There's a link to Garrison Keillor reading the poem for The Writer's Almanac, and Beban's photo on that page includes chocolate, or, as it reads in French, chocolat! Now you're tempted, yes?!

This afternoon, my poetry workshop starts up again, with red wine and new assignments. I was tickled by the coincidence that Richard Beban and his wife Kaaren Kitchell also teach workshops in their home! Kitchell is also represented in Heaven and Hell, with the stunning poem "Blue Town" and the glorious gift of "Gift."

Later this month, I start teaching a couple of classes in ekphrasis, or poetry in response to painting, at the McLean County Arts Center. Yes, the new year begins! Heaven on earth, in bowling alley or art gallery, living room or kitchen, church or hiking trail. And, speaking of hiking in Illinois, let's save Starved Rock. And, speaking of heaven on earth, take a look at the slide show of photos by M.A. Rauf here, in the blog synch-ro-niz-ing.

On the Trail

2012-01-07T09:29:00.000-06:00

I've been on the trail lately, our local hiking/biking Constitution Trail, one of those rails-to-trails renovations, thanks to the wonderfully warm weather. Yesterday I bumped (not literally) into a poet friend on his bicycle, teaching his "new knees" (post-surgery) how to bend and getting some of the fresh winter air. Conversing, we right away went deep, as he noted; it's what we always do: get to the heart of things. We are poet friends.

The day before that, a total stranger, out for a run, cared for me, my random life. We were crossing the street together, where the trail crosses the road, in opposite directions. We had waited for one car, and another was just then turning left out of the school parking lot. She'd had time to see us and was driving slowly, and had paused, but I think he noticed how she was now blinded by the sun, and he made eye contact with me and said, softly, "Watch out," not to frighten but just to alert me in case she lost me in the sun. We all survived.

This small spontaneous kindness fills me with all kinds of wonder. Of course, this is what we should be doing for one another in the world, caring for and protecting one another, but so often we don't. People go on in their routines, neglecting one another or not paying sufficient attention, and wham! or alas! or dwindle...sigh...

Anyway, my heart was warmed, and so was my body, by the winter sun.

Somehow this connects to Once, by Meghan O'Rourke, a book I reviewed for Rattle here. I was reading it before Christmas, not knowing that the poet's mother would die on Christmas Day in these poems. There was plenty I did not know about O'Rourke, and, I guess, was glad not to know, and only learned today, reading this other review, by Greg Weiss, also in Rattle, of Halflife, a book I got hold of, used, after reading Once. (I look forward to reading it but will wait till the perfect, random time!)

And, by chance, I had a lunch meeting with a poet friend over the holidays who had just finished reading The Long Goodbye, O'Rourke's memoir about her mother. She found it sentimental. I did not find the poems sentimental, just straightforward and fairly spare. I must ponder what is meant by "sentimental" each time that comes up about someone's writing, including my own. (And I have to answer a question about avoiding sentimentality in love poems for an interview pretty soon!) I consider myself tenderhearted but not very sentimental. I have too much irony in me for that. But that doesn't stop anyone from accusing me of it! Which I say laughing, because, among the things one might be accused of in life, sentimentality is harmless and not illegal.

Anyhoo, like Greg Weiss, I didn't know anything about Meghan O'Rouke before I read Once, except that she'd written these other books and had a professional career. I find myself cringing a bit at the "gossip" that Weiss notes has attached to her, and I continue to feel the same compassion I felt before, now adding some for the suffering that goes with being gossiped about. I wish her a full and gentle healing as she continues the lifelong grieving for her mother, and I am glad she has writing as an outlet for this grief. All the rest is her own business, and no doubt she's attending to it. If I were a runner on the trail, and saw a car too near, the driver blinded by the sun, I'd make eye contact with her and say softly, "Watch out."

In the Pink

2012-01-06T10:11:00.000-06:00

If I say I am starting the new year off "in the pink," I mean it more literally than an expression enclosed by quotation marks might suggest. And, while I am enormously healthy, I probably don't mean "in the pink" as in perfect physical condition, though I do start my Stretch & Tone class again soon, as I can't swim laps outdoors now and walks will become less frequent as winter progresses, though I took one on the trail yesterday and will walk into town today.* This gentle fitness class is a gift from my mom, and she'll be in it, too! Thanks, Mom!

By "in the pink," I mean I have been surrounded by pink at dusk and dawn the past few days, glorious pink. Last night the pink surrendered completely to blue fairly quickly, but the night before it was like living in a world of pink for some time, yes, a sustainable pink. This morning, on the brink of post-holiday nostalgic despair while driving my daughter back to school, I was a Jonah inside a pale blue whale with ribs of pink.

Sometimes when I use a particular expression, I remember asking my mom, "What does that mean?" Those wonderful moments of childhood confusion and delight return. I remember asking my mom, "What are whores devores?' and her asking to see the exact place in the book I was reading. Yes, they were hors d'oeuvres, and if I could graze on a steady diet of not-too-rich hors d'oeuvres, I probably would. Hoping they'd keep me in the pink.

These days I can Google a phrase, to learn more about its meaning and origins, as I did with "in the pink," finding this delightful article on its history and this fashion website. I am unlikely either to shop in the pink or to hunt foxes (also, we learn, an unlikely origin of the phrase, as the fox hunting jackets were scarlet and the tailor Thomas Pink might not have existed), but I am very likely to see pinks in my garden again come spring and was delighted to learn (or re-learn) that the name Pinks relates perhaps to color, perhaps to the "pinked" (as in pinking shears) edges, and to the Dutch name for these pink Dianthus flowers, "'pink-ooghen'--'little eye' (literally--to blink)." (And I am glad the flower connection is "to blink" and not pink-eye, or conjunctivitis.)

The other place I go regularly to learn about word origins is the Con-fessions of Ignorance blog, where a fine discussion of trifles is ongoing! Yes, this is the same excellent person who once thought I had called her a Versatile Slattern!

*And I was urged out of doors yesterday not only by the fine winter weather (40s, 50s, and today maybe even a high of 60!) but also by the blog & walks of poet Carol Berg, who has lovely poems up in the new issue of IthacaLit, which, she says, she found thanks to me! Yay! Ah! And her blog background, you'll notice, is pink!

Superhero Son

2012-01-05T10:06:00.000-06:00

OK, permit me a huge wracking sob, and then I'll get on with my day. We are a tenderhearted family wamily--I think even genetically!--and goodbyes are hard. My son headed back to college today, a beautiful, sunny, blue-sky day, not too cold, good for traveling, and he'll probably be back for a visit fairly soon, by train, but--gasp, wrack--! My little boy who wore cowboy boots and Batman jammies every day for the early years of his life. He will graduate from college this spring and, I hope, get a good job in Chicago as an industrial designer!

OK, it may be time for some reading around in Literary Mama.

No, he was not this Batman. This is vintage TV Batman. But his jammies were. Vintage Batman gray.

Crab Creek, Sugar Creek, and Spoon River

2012-01-04T10:48:00.001-06:00

When the mail did arrive yesterday, in answer to my question, “Where’s the mail?”, it brought the new issue of Crab Creek Review, where, in a wonderful random coincidence, I found myself back-to-back with Marie Gauthier, the lovely poet I also mentioned yesterday as having just been reviewed at Fiddler Crab, home of the poetry chapbook review! Marie’s poem “Dispatch from the Sick-House” is on page 17, and my poem “Waking Up Fragile” is on page 18 of the winter issue of Crab Creek, with its marvelous magical rowboat cover! I hope it is all right to reproduce it here, sending you to more of Lucia Neare’sTheatrical Wonders here!

This particular photo reminds me of a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the woods of Saginaw, Michigan, many years ago. I was Titania (and Hippolyta) and was rowed across to a clearing for one of the scenes. Of course, I was not the one wearing the ass head.

Then yesterday I was gazing into the cold but rippling water of Sugar Creek, snow and ice on its banks, as we stacked a tower of freshwater mussel shells for a new ad to go with a new logo for Spoon River Poetry Review, now edited by Kirstin Hotelling Zona, who wants to make a clear distinction between the review, named for the actual Spoon River, and Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, a completely different poetic endeavor.

Spoon River, as Zona explains in her introduction to issue 36.1, the winter/spring 2011 issue of SRPR, “was itself purportedly named for the palm-sized freshwater mussels to which it was home, bivalves whose shells, so the story has it, were used by the region’s Native Americans in preparing and serving food.”

Yes, as spoons.

So that’s what we were doing: stacking shells like pancakes in a heap, or pearly inside up as spoons, and strewing them on the crackly ice and snow in that “certain slant of light” (not at all oppressive) of a winter afternoon.

Here’s how this came about: in “Amelie” fashion, when Kirstin asked if any of us Sugar Creek and Spoon River poet naturalists might have some photos of stacked mussels, or a set of mussels to stack, I recommended Dennis Campbell, a biology professor, whose class I’d once accompanied down to the banks of Sugar Creek to find and sort mussel shells.*

Soon after that field day, I wrote a wacky poem incorporating the wacky names of freshwater mussel species in Illinois. Look for it to appear in a forthcoming issue of SRPR! I connected Kirstin and Dennis by email, because, hey, that’s what I do, and sure enough he drove up from Springfield, stopping in Lincoln, to pick up mussel shells from his Lincoln College lab, and we spent a lovely afternoon under the blue sky, looking at water, and taking pictures of shells. Look for them in a forthcoming ad for SRPR.

*Dennis and his class also found the world’s largest woolly mammoth on another field day that spring! Look for it (in pieces) in the Illinois State Museum and the soon-to-open Environmental Center at Lincoln College! Both tusks were found (and I got to stick my arm up one), a partial jaw, and other pieces, and perhaps there will be more (mammoth) to come!

So, from Crab Creek to Sugar Creek and Spoon River, from freshwater mussels to woolly mammoths, all in one blog entry. That should get us through the hump of the week!

For me, it’s back to the “exquisite dark beauty” of Crab Creek Review, as editors Kelli Russell Agodon & Annette Spaulding-Convy call it in their Editors’ Note. Exquisite, indeed.

Where's the Mail?

2012-01-03T08:59:00.000-06:00

Remember that wonderful Wendy's commercial starring Clara Peller coming round to the refrain, "Where's the beef?" Well, if you are too young to remember it, it's all over youtube and here at Wikipedia. Or clickable here at Retro Screamers Flashbacks.

Anyhoo, our wonderful mail carrier retired at the end of the year. Yes, his last day on the route was Saturday, December 31, 2011, New Year's Eve, and I got to hug him goodbye by the mailbox. Since I do a lot of walking, in good weather, my path intersected with his often, and I sometimes long to be a mail carrier...but that's another story. A fantasy story.

As I was anyhooing, on Monday, January 2, 2012, I put out the mail as usual, via yellow plastic clothespin, and it was never picked up. Nor did any mail arrive! Where's the mail?

Was Monday a holiday, too? Is the new mail carrier not yet in place? Have the troubles with the post office arrived (not arrived) at my own front door? In good faith, I have put the mail out again today and hope it will be a fine Fat Tuesday in the mailbox, with late Christmas cards, the usual bills, and the usual junk.

We'll see!

Meanwhile, also in a kind of Fat Tuesday celebration, I point you to Hunger All Inside, a chapbook of poems by Marie Gauthier, reviewed by Susan Jo Russell at Fiddler Crab Review!

Math Challenged

2012-01-02T09:07:00.000-06:00

It's daunting and inspiring reading about everyone's goals for 2012 and/or lists of accomplishments in 2011. All I managed to do on New Year's Day was

1) all the laundry in the house
2) a bit of reading and writing
3) make new (recycled) folders for submissions, rejections, acceptances in 2012
4) some tallying of s/r/a in 2011

Along with Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, aka The Angry Grammarian, I'll aim for 100 rejections this next year. Actually, her accounting starts on September 1, so I've tallied from there and will re-tally from January 1, 2012, as well, if I can handle it given my math challenge! I think I can, I think I can...

As of September 1, 2011, I've sent out 45 packets of something (11.25 per month, yes?), with 7 acceptances and 15 rejections. So about half of those are still out there.

Looking back to January 1, 2011, I sent out 111 packets of something (pre-100 rejection goal; only averaging 9.25 per month), with 45 rejections, 34 acceptances, and 32 still pending (including the 23 pending in the other tally).

Keep on chugging (up the hill) and breezing (down the hill) is advice from someone (over the hill). Someone who's cheering herself up on a Blue Monday, that Christmas-is-over kind of blue. But mostly I let myself feel that yesterday and distracted myself with numbers today.

Beyond Us

2012-01-01T17:03:00.000-06:00

I wish you a good year. Today was a hibernation day for us, and last night we connected by phone with old friends, who stood in the woods looking at the moon. I am weary, grateful, and glad. Much is beyond me. Here is a book I hope to read in 2012, with many others. Reading is good. Books are good. I still like to hold them in my hand and turn the pages. I love books. In a way, they are the humans beyond us.

Limbo Fire Dancing

2011-12-31T09:15:00.000-06:00

The limbo days and random coincidii continue.

After I declared yesterday, a Friday, to be a Blue Monday in the blog, I found my poem "Blues" up at Blue Fifth Review in the Blue Five Notebook series: Short pieces by various writers, plus a fascinating set of diptychs (here, two-part poems) from The Ghost of Yesterday, by Susan Terris, followed by her process notes.

I love process notes, and I like how hers moves to this shared sentiment: "But isn't the poet often the last one to know what he or she is actually trying to discover or to write about?" She discovered something big, so go read it!

By chance, I'd recently read Ghost, by Gaylord Brewer, and reviewed it for Prick of the Spindle, so this was particularly eerie and moving for me in that way, too. Also, this holiday season I revisited The Muppet Christmas Carol for all my ghostly needs.

Thanks to Wikipedia and Two Wings for the limbo fire dance, and to Hannah Stephenson for suggesting that we dance the limbo!

Happy New Year's Eve!

Lemon, Bowl, Walnuts, Leaves, Bees

2011-12-30T12:14:00.000-06:00

Oh, thank you, Jonathan Koch, for this painting titled Lemon, Bowl, Walnuts, Leaves, Bees. It fits my blog perfectly on this "limbo" day "between the years," as poet Sarah J. Sloat explains/describes it in her blog, with the Germans even giving this between name to it. I have lost track of the dates, if not the days, and of the time of day. This morning the blue-gray sky seemed surely twilight, and I can't believe now it's only noonish (and in a blurry time, when I actually post this, post numerous interruptions....)

Anyhoo, it's a comfort to me to see things labeled clearly as what they are. Similarly, I love this list of books forthcoming in 2012 at the blog of poet Karen J. Weyant. Wait! Do all the poets I know have middle names that start with "J"?!

And happy birthday to The Bloggess!

As for me, I'm calling this Friday a Blue Monday in the blog. Because it's not.

Kicking the Ham

2011-12-28T10:07:00.000-06:00

It's true: there's leftover turkey and ham in the house (my mother's house) from the holiday feasting, but now there is also leftover birthday cake.

My dear sister turned 50 yesterday, utterly surprised by the sudden arrival in the afternoon of extended family and a college/theatre buddy, not even alerted by the sign at the foot of the drive announcing that "Chris is 50!" as we turned in, arriving home after the annual birthday coffee chat in the Barnes & Noble coffeeshop. We just both laughed at the driveway greeting!

Anyhoo, guests included Kay and Matt, who used to celebrate Christmas by giving each other the gift of a canned ham, the same ham, creatively re-wrapped each year, and once or twice, I seem to recall (?), delivered by mail or FedEx. That prank gift tradition has bitten the dust...ew...but now there's a new poetry/music collaboration beginning here, at Ham Kicker: Collaboration and Transparency in Music, created by Joe Robinson. I interviewed Joe here, at Escape Into Life.

So if you are looking for something cool to do with your poems in the new year, check out Ham Kicker! And if you like this violin, check out more art by Scott Kahn!

Love, Actually

2011-12-27T09:22:00.000-06:00

Love continues. Joy and warmth. Plus the eating! I hope and trust that you are all safe, warm, and happy somewhere this week as the holiday season continues. We have light snow cover today for a White After Christmas. And last night we introduced my mom to the holiday film Love, Actually (which I must remember to return to the library today!). Very funny, everybody's in it, and, as I had predicted to myself, she laughed out loud at the English subtitles from the Portuguese!

And my good news is that I actually won the love poem contest at Adanna Journal! Sometimes I am happy and lucky enough to be a finalist in a contest, but twice in 2011 I was a winner. What a joy and surprise. Congrats to all the finalists and prizewinners, and I look forward to the issue and to meeting some Adanna poets in early March at a reading at the AWP Conference in Chicago. (See Events at right.)

Lo, How a Rose

2011-12-24T12:14:00.000-06:00

While it is true that I kept a poinsettia alive all year only to kill it at Christmastime, I do have a tiny rose just now opening in a pot here on Christmas Eve. The Exotic Angels are doing a blooming dance of joy, as well, and there's new burst of blue lobelia. The pale pink begonias in the once-hanging pots just keep opening, all of these in a row on woven straw mats in the sunshine of the patio doors, taking the spot once reserved for shoes and boots, which are grudgingly clumped here and there on rugs and in corners. Oh, forgive me, shoes and boots and the feet who wear them!

I baked my tropical husband a coconut cake for Christmas, soon to be iced with Joy of Cooking boiled icing (unless I kill it) and sprinkled with the remaining coconut. This 7-Minute frosting at Food Network is essentially it, and I will take Alton Brown's advice to beat the frosting over the simmering water, and to use the frosting itself (instead of strawberry or raspberry preserves) between layers. Also, my cake has two layers instead of four. Why am I baking a cake from scratch and making boiled icing on a Slattern Day? Because it's Christmas Eve! (But I did not smash an actual coconut, so I think I can still claim to be a true slattern. Also, you should see the thin layer of flour on my kitchen floor.)

Happy and sweet holidays to you. Peace and goodwill.

The Poetry Cheerleader

2011-12-23T09:38:00.000-06:00

Hey, you know how I am always calling myself "the poetry cheerleader" here in my goofy blog/life? Well, now I am one! Officially. I'm it! Over at Prick of the Spindle, in the newly redesigned site just up today with the new issue!

This means that even though I could never really do the tiger jump, I can be a cheerleader!

The Poetry Cheerleader is my new poetry-review column! First up is The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree, by Kevin Pilkington. I also have a couple reviews in the regular review section: Ghost, by Gaylord Brewer, and Four of a Kind, by Mark Neely.

Plus, you can read a bunch of other reviews, poems, stories, interviews, essays, and even drama, as you can see from this table of contents page! I do like the new design at Prick of the Spindle! Very easy even for somebody as click-challenged as I am. So, congratulations to editor Cynthia Reeser on all her hard work!

Now I want to tell you about a random coincidence (which, yes, is redundant, right?) involving epigraphs. Killing the Murnion Dogs, by Joe Wilkins, reviewed over in the Escape Into Life blog, begins with this quotation from Bruce Springsteen:

Everything dies, baby, that's a fact.
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree, by Kevin Pilkington, begins with 3 epigraphs, one of which is this, by Ben Jonson:

Time will not be ours forever;
He at length our good will sever.
Spend not then his gifts in vain,
Suns that set may rise again.

This kind of thing makes sparks fly out of my poetry cheer-leader origami brain. Thanks to Phillip Compton (EIL store artist) for the spider mums that resemble cheerleader pom pons. And to Sports Bag Blog for these silver and gold ones and fabulous advice on "How to Choose the Right Poms Poms."

The Day the Sun Stood Still

2011-12-22T09:49:00.000-06:00

Today is the Winter Solstice, with solstice meaning "sun stands still." Thanks, again, to The Writer's Almanac for that, and the lovely poem "December," by Gary Johnson.

I will continue the holiday baking with Chocolate Oat Bars, requested by my daughter, a recipe from Joy of Cooking, (stained) pages 702-703 in my particular edition. These are the cookie bars I gave to my husband early in our courtship, which, evidently, made him think I could cook. (I can't, except accidentally.) The theory is that the rolled oats will roll away the sweetened condensed milk, chocolate, and cholesterol. No worries.

And there's a nice picture of the sun and moon on the same horizon, a thing that happened during that recent eclipse, over at Escape Into Life, in the blog, where I have posted a mini-review of Killing the Murnion Dogs, by Joe Wilkins, decorated with art by Phillip Compton. It's a wonderful book that crunched and unfolded my origami heart.

Anything Can Happen Day

2011-12-21T12:47:00.000-06:00

In my usual roundabout way, I learned that today, Wednesday, was Anything Can Happen Day on the Mickey Mouse Club television show that I used to watch when I was a toddler. Telling family stories, my mom imitates my fairly pre-verbal singing voice, "Mi-mi Mou, Mi-mi Mou...".

I should have known it was Anything Can Happen Day when I was driving to the grocery store behind a car with antlers.

Reindeer antlers.

And then, get this (!), on the way home, I saw another car with reindeer antlers at the same intersection. A different car. First was a gray wagon; second, a white mini-van. So people are out there driving around with reindeer antlers.

I am glad I am staying home now, baking more pumpkin bread. Of course, yesterday I was out there as the Christmas Bunny, delivering red velvet mini-cupcakes in an egg carton. But I did not put bunny ears on my car.

OK, this bug is cute.

News of the Day

2011-12-20T11:09:00.000-06:00

Question: Why are people on Facebook saying that Jon Bon Jovi is dead?

Answer: Because people on Twitter are.

Sigh... Apparently, it's a hoax. (I checked with New Jersey.) I hate getting my news from Facebook.

Meanwhile, my friend Bill sent me this article on "the microeconomics of poetry." Oh, so that's why I'm so poor. I asked him to recommend any good second job he can think of, but so far he's employing my husband to fix his garage, which is good enough for now!

A fine working poet is our poet laureate, Philip Levine, and this is his News of the World, which you can get here from Random House. Many thanks to President Ronald Reagan for establishing that position for a national poet, and to Garrison Keillor and The Writer's Almanac for reminding me of that.

And you'll want to read "Human Beauty," by Albert Goldbarth, the poem up there today, with its lovely claim that "the poem is an origami bird," which will fit right in among the other origami folds of my brain. But now I'm off to handle the tiny accordian folds of cupcake liners and mini-cupcake liners, because the holiday baking continues, and it's Fat Tuesday in the blog!

Cashew! Bless Me!

2011-12-19T13:11:00.000-06:00

OK, round three on the Rolo turtles today, made with cashews. Mini-pretzel topped with Rolo candy (chocolate, caramel), 3 minutes at 350 degrees to soften, not melt; then top with a cashew, pressing down softly. I seem to have given away all the previous pecan turtles as holiday or house gifts already! I promise, I only ate, like, two, maybe three, the lopsided ones!

Meanwhile, this wonderful, strange, many-armed, multicultural Eve is here to bless us! It's the new chapbook, A Wicked Apple, by Susan Slaviero just out at Hyacinth Girl Press! In conveniently Christmasy colors: red, green, & gold.

You may remember Susan Slaviero from Halloween here in the blog and at Escape Into Life, here and here, and as the author of Cyborgia, here and here! And here, at Mayapple Press. Not to mention here, for a random robot arm.

So it's been a fruity month, with Hawaiian Papayas, mandarin oranges, tangerines, and now a wicked apple! I'm sure we'll find a figgy pudding somewhere, too.

Everybody's Home!

2011-12-18T08:34:00.000-06:00

The nuclear family is home!

Let the sibling rivalry begin!

Yes, the brotherly-sisterly antagonism has begun, all in love and good fun.

So far.

And, in honor of that, I have declared it, finally, a Cranky Doodle Day in the blog.

Cranky Doodle Day, you may recall, is a day for me to get cranky about something (not happening much lately, since I am suffused with joy) and/or do something in the "Crafty Doodle Day" mode of my friend Lorel. Since I am known to stick my fingers together with glue (inadvertently), cranking and crafting do stick together in my house!

So today I am lunching with a poet friend and later dropping in on an open house, where we will all be visiting a bathroom recently rehabbed by my husband (of 22 years). Have I mentioned that my husband is credited with keeping a certain marriage together by completing their kitchen rehab?! I do not speak of my own marriage in this instance. Our kitchen still needs rehab....

So, to the point: crafty doodle home made holiday gifts! Yes, it's the Rolo turtles in white margarine tubs decorated on top with recycled Christmas cards trimmed with craft scissors (Seagull edge). I knew saving all those margarine tubs and Christmas cards would come in handy someday!

And if you love Christmas music and lush voices, here's a CD for you: Sibling Revelry, by Ann Hampton Calloway and Liz Calloway. I gave it to my sister one year for Christmas, as I recall, so it is the Voice(s) of Christmas Present Past.

Hawaiian Papayas

2011-12-17T10:10:00.000-06:00

Although it is Slattern Day in the blog, I do have chores to do, so I will be brief.

I want to get everything done in time to watch Rachel Feldman, local high school alum, in Illini volleyball, in Nationals, on ESPN-2, on my parents' big-screen tv, at 7:30 p.m., Central time.

That said, there is laundry to do, and there are cashews to buy for round 2 of Rolo turtles, the good-for-your-teeth, crescent-moon version. (I believe they are still working on that cashew-based toothpaste, so please content yourself with cashew butter, crescent-moon treats, and the nuts themselves. They are good for your teeth, if you don't crack your teeth on them, and if you floss.)

But what shall I blog about today? "Sometimes--there are papayas--so quickly!" Thank you again, Jonathan Koch, for this newest painting, Hawaiian Papayas on Cloth. I know people are grousing about the cost of President Obama's family vacation to Hawaii, but I'm glad he gets to have one, and I hope he has a merry Christmas.

And thank you, Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams, and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Orange You Glad

2011-12-16T07:15:00.000-06:00

Remember that incessant knock-knock joke? Knock knock. Who's there? Banana. Banana who? Knock knock.Who's there? Banana. Banana who? And so on, until: Knock knock. Who's there? Orange. Orange who? Orange you glad I didn't say banana?

Who knew I'd be telling a childhood knock knock joke in my blog on the morning of our 22nd wedding anniversary? 22 years married + 8 courting = 30 years of togetherness.

On this day in 1989 we headed downtown to the courthouse to be married by a judge who looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln. Our friends Gary and Pat came as witnesses, and then we went over to the Walnut Room at Marshall Field's for brunch beside the gigantic Christmas tree.

A week later they joined us at home, at my parents' house, for a small family ceremony that led also into the celebration of Christmas. Tony's mother came up from Miami, and his brother's family came over from Missouri. My sister's family arrived from Ohio and my brother's from California. Quite a year.

There's a banana joke in here somewhere, but I'm thanking Jonathan Koch for the mandarin and tangerines.

Knock knock. Who's there? Orange. Orange who? Orange you glad we got married?

Thor by Proxy

2011-12-15T08:25:00.000-06:00

It's Thor's Day in the blog, but I don't have anything to smash with a hammer. I have not been keeping up with Cranky Doodle Day, either. I am so not cranky. A little blue now and then, but that's my melancholy nature. It allows for deep and quiet joy, too.

So here's a link to an article on rejection--in list format--at Terrible Minds (by Chuck Wendig). 25 Things Writers Should Know About Rejection. It is hilarious and true! (I sent it to my poetry workshop, warning them that it contains bad words, and telling them it applies mainly to fiction writers, but that we can apply it to ourselves. Directly to our wounds, if we want!) I have received my share of rejections and learned a lot from them!

Speaking of Thor, god of thunder, we had actual thunder and lightning here yesterday!

Hail, Mary!

2011-12-14T08:42:00.000-06:00

The new poetry feature is up at Escape Into Life! It's the fabulous Mary Biddinger, with cool collage art by Tony Fitzpatrick, sometimes in oddly Christmasy colors, like this red and green fish!

And I've been reflecting on the Virgin Mary, thanks to this 3rd Sunday of Advent reflection by Susan Ryder over at the Reflecting Pool. It provoked quite a discussion, I hear, not exactly in response to the questions at the end or the continuing theme of "Fear not."

My mom and I missed church for that train trip to Chicago to hear readings from Solace in So Many Words at Woman Made Gallery. So we were reflecting on important things, but we were not discussing Mary's virginity (or lack thereof) or the virtues of fine storytelling as part of most religions.

Actually, I was discussing religion and mythology in my Solace essay, so I guess this is a Random Coinciday in the blog, too.

To that end, I would just like to say that it was not quite coincidence that I picked this art for Mary's poems. That is, I chose this coincidence of hairstyle. See the straight-across bangs on the girl in this collage? Just like Mary Biddinger's! Although that's a bit hidden under her green winter hat in the EIL bio photo. Just like "hidden" meanings in poems (or lack thereof).

Hail, Mary, full of grace.

Comfort Food for Thought

2011-12-13T09:21:00.000-06:00

It’s Fat Tuesday in the blog, so I should perhaps discuss the upcoming pumpkin bread blitz, the weird cupcake extravaganza (exploding in my origami brain), or the Rolo turtles (Rolo melted on a mini-pretzel, topped with a pecan) that I hope not to burn, my excellent mashed potatoes (secret ingredients: potatoes, butter, cream) (always my Christmas dinner contribution, along with the pumpkin bread), but, after this fat sentence is over, I intend to mention two statements that were, for me, a kind of “comfort food for thought” involving poetry.

Both statements come from The Writer’s Almanac, which, like everything else, needs your financial support.

Today there is this, from James Wright, who, like me, went to Kenyon College. He’s talking about thinking he was done with poetry and discovering he was not:

“Sometimes there is a force of life like the spring which mysteriously takes shape without your even having asked it to take shape, and this is frightening, it is terribly frightening. …Being a poet sometimes puts you at the mercy of life, and life is not always merciful.”

And on Sunday, there was this from poet and novelist JimHarrison:

“Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That’s the main content. The biggest thing in people’s lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.”

Yes, exactly! As poets we resist and fear being sentimental--that is, asking for more emotion that is warranted, or manipulating the reader (jerking the tears), or telling the reader how to feel, etc. But, sometimes, we should…yes, fear not! And remember that our “loves and dreams and visions” already connect to theirs.

Now, I could complain about male writers getting away with tender, honest statements like this and women writers getting dismissed or insulted for similar tenderness…but I won’t. That’s been said before, noticed by many. I want to be done with that and let us all speak as openly and honestly as we want in our poems.

And, anyway, the tenderness was criticized in these male writers—for instance, in this Poetry Foundation article about Wright. But tenderness seldom bothers tender-hearted me, and one of my favorite poems is “A Blessing.” Oh, how I love the tender eyes and ears of those ponies “[j]ust off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota.”

We are sentimental. Being a poet is frightening.

Fortunately, there’s chocolate. And mashed potatoes. Not together though, OK?

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

2011-12-12T16:34:00.000-06:00

My mom and I went to a funeral today for the farmer up the road. We sat next to his friend, Gus, 95, who is, for us, the farmer next door. It was good to be all together there, and good to hug Mr. Rinehart's children (my generation), who had all been together in April for the death of their mother.

A tough year.

It put me in mind of the melancholy song, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." I didn't realize just how much of a downer it was--with the original Meet Me in St. Louis-based lyrics--till I read this Wikipedia article. I have to say I like the revisions that emerged in the movie and in recordings since.

Here is the youtube clip of Judy Garland singing the song to Margaret O'Brien in the window seat scene, complete with the smashing of the snow people! The first time I saw this movie, that scene amazed me--very dark, very crazy, real tears. I guess Margaret O'Brien was quite well known for her real tears.

But it was a beautiful, sunny, blue-sky day on this Blue Monday in the blog. And the jazzy "Amazing Grace" at the end of the funeral had already put smiles back on our faces. Robert Rinehart, farmer, also played the saxophone!

And that's Judy Garland, above, from a different movie, looking like a snow angel.

Comfort and Joy

2011-12-11T23:12:00.000-06:00

Lovely reading at Woman Made Gallery today, contributors to Solace in So Many Words, edited by Ellen Wade Beals. Taped by Kurt Eric Heintz for Chicago Amplified, WBEZ, so you can eventually hear/stream it. My little group of Normal poets so enjoyed the poems and stories they heard and the art all around. I read an excerpt from my essay "The Solace of Reading..." and here is a book tree from Half Price Blog. And to all...a good night!

Greensleeves (Reprise)

2011-12-10T07:35:00.000-06:00

When I wrote earlier about "Greensleeves" I awakened fond memories of that melody and various versions in many, some who commented here (see the Debby Reynolds version) and some over at Facebook, where I was told my hot pink cleaning gloves* might clash with my green sleeves.... Thanks, David, who gave us this fabulous youtube link to the John Coltrane version.

This is Our Lady of Greensleeves, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, altered by Maris Stella to enhance the green of the sleeves. But today is Slattern Day, so we are also considering the untidy possibility of grass stains on the sleeves of a loose woman, all thanks to Wikipedia (which needs your cash, also green).

And this is Virginia from The Clean House, by Sarah Ruhl, who must surely have a recipe for laundering grass stains from loose sleeves. And, yes, those are her hot pink cleaning gloves (*) trimmed in pink and yellow feathers. (I did the laundry yesterday so I could be a slattern today! And/or write poetry, always a little untidy to start out.)

And it's Emily Dickinson's 181st birthday, so let's sing to her, and also to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Thanks, Eleanor Roosevelt!

Peeled Mandarin

2011-12-09T08:40:00.001-06:00

I saw crates of clementines in the grocery store yesterday, and I'm thinking fondly of our Christmas tradition of tangerines in the toes of our stockings. But this is Peeled Mandarin, another lovely painting by Jonathan Koch, who is painting a virtual cornucopia! A fine fruit basket of beauty!

Coming up: a cornucopia of comforts by way of a reading/book signing event for Solace in So Many Words, edited by Ellen Wade Beals, this Sunday, December 11, 2-4 p.m., at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago. I am going up by Amtrak with members of my local poetry workshop! We will bring food--maybe clementines!--and talk on the train, all the way there and back. And/or write!

And it's snowing! The first real snow, sticking to the ground. We had the first area snows a little while back, and the other day when I opened the door to toss a couple apple cores to the squirrels I stepped into a few flicks of snow, but this is the real thing!

Now I'll have the chorus of "Snow Angel" going in my head, from Tori Amos's Midwinter Graces, chasing away "Pink and Glitter." Or just chasing, maybe not away....

And my citrusy orange and yellow exotic angels are wildly in bloom! But, alas, the poinsettia is presumed dead.

What Song is This?

2011-12-08T08:35:00.000-06:00

Today I decorate the blog with Guava with Leaves, another gorgeous painting by Jonathan Koch.

In the close-up at his website, the brown leaves look like a pair of brown lips puckered for a kiss. That kiss and the guava's green leaves put me in mind of "Greensleeves," the famous, probably Elizabethan love song, perhaps about a promiscuous woman, maybe just a flirtatious one, that has new Christmassy lyrics in "What Child is This?" that we are hearing on the radio (and in stores, if we are the shopping type) this time of year.

Here are the lyrics to "Greensleeves."

And here are the lyrics to "What Child is This?"

I loved learning from Wikipedia that some people thought the song was written by Henry VIII to woo Anne Boleyn, which seems unlikely, historically, but sounds good as legend. My daughter is writing a research paper on Anne Boleyn for her Honors English class, so she's been immersed in that story and, at some point, I'd love to borrow Anne of The Thousand Days from the library and watch it with her. Anne is Genevieve Bujold! Oooh, it's also time to see Choose Me again, with Bujold as Dr. Nancy Love!

Oh, dear, it's a total Random Coinciday in the blog. And yet, somehow it all connects. For instance, speaking of Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded by her husband Henry, not such a nice guy in the long run, puts me in mind of yesterday's Split Pomegranate, for various reasons.

And now I have decorated the blog for Christmas, in red and green.

Split Pomegranate

2011-12-07T08:07:00.000-06:00

If you mistype "pomegranate," you can end up with "poemgranate," so Split Poemgranate was almost the title of today's blog entry, which would have been about something altogether different, you can bet. Instead, I offer you Split Pomegranate, another example of the fine art of Jonathan Koch.

Perhaps you must have it for yourself or would give it as a Christmas gift...!

Today at Escape Into Life, you can see the Pushcart Prize Nominations in the EIL Blog, along with art by Yuri Ogawa Terazaki. Let us be compassionate and honorable as we remember Pearl Harbor Day, and all that came before and after it.

Man Seeks God

2011-12-06T08:27:00.000-06:00

Regular blog readers know I love NPR and belong to a book group that just read The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. Imagine my delight to hear an interview with Weiner yesterday on NPR. You can click to read about or hear it here. Not everybody in my book group enjoyed Weiner's whiny humor, but Man Seeks God sounds like a book I will seek out, being, if not a "gastronomical Jew," at least, like him, a perpetual seeker.

Plus there is the coincidence of seeking out Sufism, which I did accidentally in Arizona on the desert at a Catholic poets' retreat. Haven't I already told you this story? Never mind. Let's just say Weiner and I both like the Sufi poet Rumi. So, sue me.

Woman Seeks Poinsettia

Recently I said to my husband, "I like keeping things alive," which he was happy to hear. I was referring to houseplants and pot plants I'd brought indoors to keep alive over the winter. I've also managed to keep a poinsettia alive since an after-Christmas sale at the grocery store last season. This one was thriving outside during the hot, sometimes wet, sometimes dry summer, and doing OK inside, too, until I re-located it, twice.

First, it was in a spot under the counter getting plenty of sun from the sliding glass patio doors, but getting bumped and broken by people who don't pay attention to poinsettias in pots. So I moved it to the downstairs bathroom, mainly to cover up a hole in the wall (don't ask), but also in hopes of protecting it and giving it the indirect window light that the African violets seem to love.

Poinsettias do not love this same light.

So now it is pale and spindly, but maybe, just maybe, this is the spindliness before the storm of red color?

I fear not.

For red color, tips on poinsettias, and a picture of hers, see Kristin Berkey-Abbott's blog today! And Happy Feast of St. Nicholas Day on this Fat Tuesday in the blog.

Fear Not

2011-12-05T08:08:00.000-06:00

Today I have a funeral to attend, library books to renew, and a bank deposit to make--enough to pay the next bill, thanks to my odd little freelance life. Some mornings, some nights, I lie abed in worry, but last night, instead, I did my A.M. Yoga with Rodney Yee, and this seems a good solution. There is never a good time to do A.M. Yoga in the morning now, so why not do it at night? (P.M. Yoga, the other obvious choice, is too much for me.)

This is a roundabout way (my usual way) of getting to the subject of yesterday's second-Sunday-of-Advent reflection, "Fear Not," by Bob Ryder, the husband half of our doubled pastor. I did find it comforting and sustaining, and it was fun to remember that I have a poem called "Fear Not" based on the renovation of beautiful Uptown Normal, when a big crane sat there for months. Now, where there was once a hole in the street, there is a lovely award-winning traffic circle of green space.

Driving my daughter to school in my pajamas, I got to listen to some more of her music, this time "Breakable" by Ingrid Michaelson, on the album Girls and Boys, about our fragility. Lyrics here. Albums here. News/new one, Ghost, here. "Ghost" lyrics here. (By chance, I just sent off a chapbook review of Ghost, by Gaylord Brewer, to Prick of the Spindle. I do so love it when things coincide.) No matter how dark her lyrics, her "voice like an angel" encourages me to fear not.

Eye Candy

2011-12-04T08:45:00.000-06:00

It's true that I decorate for the holidays partly in candy: red and green M&Ms in clear glass dishes strewn on tables around the house. It's possible to go through a lot of decorations that way, but later there's no storage problem. I will serve some to my poetry workshop this afternoon!

Here is the new issue of Stirring with a beautiful picture of Vero Beach by Stephanie Stair on the cover/contents page. More than eye candy!

I have a poem in this called "Blue Blood Moon," written during the moon-gazing fall. It's kind of sad and scary, but I like it, and dusting a desk lamp gave me a crucial image. Blood moon is one of the names of a full October moon (see Farmer's Almanac), and a blue moon is an extra full moon in a season, so I put them together and got this, though now the term "blue blood" resonates a bit for me as the end of aristocracy, as I just saw a beautiful production of Three Sisters at Heartland Theatre, and I can't remember the Italian for "window" or "ceiling." I understudied Irina years ago at Steppenwolf Theater, so my past is laying me flat with steamroller force...

Oh, yes, this is a Random Coinciday in the blog. Thanks to Dezidor for the Christmasy red and green steamroller. And to the editors of Stirring for taking my poem. I'm off to church for the second Sunday of Advent, taking my mini-sculptures of "greens" for the wreath, and some glittery pine cones with red ribbons.

Pink and Glitter

2011-12-03T09:44:00.001-06:00

Yesterday I put together the artificial tree without too much disaster, my husband helping by replacing a bulb and clarifying the first section to stick into the base. And then I trimmed it, and it's glittering with little white lights, shiny stuff, including a big gold butterfly and a white glass volleyball.

I love our tree.

And I fell in love with "Pink and Glitter," as I was playing the Tori Amos Midwinter Graces album (and Pink Martini) as I trimmed. Lyrics here. Video here, with just piano. And here, on the David Letterman show, with the jazzy orchestra back-up as on the CD!

Reindeer

2011-12-02T07:52:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was World AIDS Day. While I celebrated the start of Advent here in the blog, I put on my black mourning costume over at Facebook, my Day Without Art black profile picture....

But it was also a big day for poetry. I had work in two online magazines that "went live" yesterday, and I will link to those in a moment, but first I'd like to share with you "Reindeer," by Sarah J. Sloat.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the public domain photos of real reindeer/caribou.

Sloat's poem comes from the new issue of YB, dedicated to Animals! My animal poem in this issue, "Too Late," has a calico cat in it.

To make it a Random Coinciday in the blog, as well as a Poetry Someday, Sloat and I also appear together in the new issue of Umbrella, which is celebrating its 5th anniversary. Click the umbrellas to enter the issue and find the marvelous offerings! Here's the page with my 2 poems.

I had great joy yesterday, and will have a good rest of the week continuing to read all the wonderful offerings in both of these magazines!

And if you are looking for holiday gifts, keep in mind that reindeer poop makes great tree ornaments! And necklaces. Oh, yes, there's a lot you can do with reindeer poop! Check it out at the Miller Park Zoo!

Advent

2011-12-01T09:33:00.000-06:00

When I moved back to my hometown and started going to church, I was delighted by the home made and ongoing Advent wreath, a kind of art installation on the altar table. On the first Sunday of Advent, people bring rocks to shape in a semi-circle around the Advent candles that will be lit one at a time. The next Sunday, it's greens (evergreens or dried flowers or creative representations of greenery); then animals (photos of pets, figurines, toys); and, finally, humans.

I was so charmed by this that I wrote a poem about it, which is now published annually in the December edition of the church newsletter. I am honored. It might not make sense to anyone but us, but here it is:

Advent

First, we bring rocks: earth curves in a bow

around the source, light. Is it miracle

or did rock bend always as the willow?

What next? Acorn, walnut, holly, bluebell

pressed with a ribbon, tuft of baby’s breath,

pine cone, lighting of the second candle

by a child. Magic again? Now our wreath

a parade of fauna: camels, a cat, a cow,

marble hippo, rocking horse. Nothing yet

prepares as well for what’s to come: our own

meager arrival as human figurines,

plaster or plastic, a fragile sturdy crowd

of admirers, rigid with unspoken awe.

We stand alive, wild at heart, hope raw.

The first Sunday of Advent this year was actually November 27, when I stood on the train platform on Sunday morning, sending my son back to school instead of bringing a rock to the wreath. This Sunday I will take the weird little stand-up cardboard triangles of "greens" I've constructed from recycled greeting cards.

Here is the reflection from that missed Sunday, if you, too, want to ponder the Sacred Mystery. I was struck by the lines quoted from Mark Nepo about the seeds cracked open in the dark. They remind me of Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem," this famous verse:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in

I just heard him singing this in the documentary Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man that I finally saw after many people had recommended it to me. Before I ever heard this song, I wrote a poem called "Damage" about banging on and cracking a wooden door and seeing the light stream in. People who read it and liked it alerted me to the famous Cohen song, which I have loved ever since. I wish I wasn't so clueless all the time...except that it allows me to fill with wonder repeatedly at the newness of what I've missed, or forgotten, thanks to the cracks in my brain.

And thanks, again, to Jonathan Koch, for another branch of persimmons! And the first, in case you missed it.

Pajamas or Pyjamas?

2011-11-30T08:00:00.000-06:00

OK, do you wear "pajamas" or "pyjamas"? If you wear "pyjamas," you are "chiefly British," according to my American Heritage Dictionary. I love to look up words, and have looked up this one before, forgetting and then remembering that pajamas are loose-fitting Persian trousers, intended for sleeping or lounging. I wear mine to drive my daughter to school in the early, early morning.

While I did not see a windmill or a little person standing on the peak of a barn roof, as in this wonderful screenprint by Daniel Danger, the sky was this blue that early. Danger's art accompanies the new poetry feature just up at Escape Into Life: Bertha Rogers. I hope you will visit it to see more and to read her wonderful poems. Notice how she's a bit of a Chesire cat in her author photo!!

And I love that this one, in its title, hast thou slain the jabberwock?, references "Jabberwocky," by Lewis Carroll!

Have a good hump of the week!

(I don't think the Jabberwock is wearing pajamas.)

Feeding Time

2011-11-29T08:08:00.001-06:00

I remember when this book arrived in summer, just in time for me to take it to the beach to read! It's full of fiddler crabs and other marine creatures. Of course, I was at the lake, not the ocean, but there was sand and water. I'm glad to be reading FeedingTime, by Emily Scudder, again now, as the cold comes on, so I can remember that summery shore.

The first poem, "Transitory Adhesion," introduces the conversational tone and a fine "transitory" randomness:

Seagulls bore me. I like this boredom.

The mind can wander, like this.

Snails latch onto other snails. Or a rock.

Clump.

With drop lines, kids fish.

Pull them up. Throw them back.

I once did that.

Sand robins are ugly fish.

And so forth. I can hear the water plopping. I can look around and see what she's seeing. I'm leaving out the heart of the poem now, the center, the personal, a loss, something for you to find on your own. Now I'm looking around again, as she does, to recover. The poem resumes

Is it the fiddler crabs?

I count on crabs when other things change.

I call this monotonous attachment.

The ocean is like this: reused, remembered.

The mind can wander, like this.

And morning fog burns off, like it does.

Oh, I love that repeated line, "The mind can wander, like this," and the perfect use of a comma there, as demonstration of how easily it's done, this mind wandering, which the whole poem also demonstrates. I love the use of "like" here, too, conversationally, and especially in that last line, to resist simile and insist on what really happens, the morning fog burning off.

I have so many favorite moments in this book, and so many come from its blunt honesty, its simplicity of statement. It's like the opposite of Virginia Woolf, but here's one I love called "A Room of One's Own" that takes place at a writer's retreat and begins:

I am not very happy.

I am supposed to be very happy.

I am supposed to eat very well.

I order clam dogs and Cokes.

Clam dogs! I didn't even know such a thing existed, but I've wanted one ever since I read about it in this poem.

The women at the Lobster Pot like me.

The women at the women's bookstore like me.

The women at the women's bookstore offer me

the lesbian discount and I am pleased.

I would be pleased, too! This poem keeps building to its solitary writing room and attached "supposed to's" and with wry humor and poignant honesty goes somewhere new that is somewhere familiar, too. I'll let you find it via Pecan Grove Press!

But before you (and I) go, I want to give you the heart of another poem, this one called "Because We All Die Someday." It opens with a Woolfean sentiment, "And all I want is an hour to myself," which is also a Rita Dove sentiment...or any hardworking woman's sentiment, especially the writer kind. But here's exactly what I identify with, connecting me to my mother, who mows, and grandmother, who picked up sticks in the yard, and to the chores we ask our kids to help us with:

When I pick sticks off the lawn

my kids hate to help. Groan.

Why are we doing this anyway?

Because I did when I was a kid.

Because sticks jam the mower.

Because we all die someday, and picking

sticks is a small thing

and makes Grandma happy.

I love that "Groan," like the earlier "Clump." I love, again, that simple repetition that gets the job done.

Despite the reminder of death and the line "I am not very happy," this book is full of animal joy and family joy. I love the poetic renewal of vows in "If I Married You Again" with its new wedding attire--"I'd wear pants / and black boots"--and its raw desire! (Ah, I appreciate this "monotonous attachment" so different from the snail's!) "Throw my flowers like a shortstop."

I celebrate this book the way she'd re-do her wedding: "Raise a fist / for the real of it."

Poet Emily Scudder is also the founder of Fiddler Crab Review, dedicated to reviewing chapbooks, new or old. I was thrilled when I first found this site, kept reading and admiring, and now I do reviews there, too! So if you have a chapbook, here's where to send it!

First Snow

2011-11-28T15:25:00.000-06:00

Supposedly we've had the first snow of the season, not far from here, and there might be more of a dusting tonight, also not far from here, but I'll be fine if it wants to hold off.

The local flora is in that in-between stage--some trees totally bare, others still flaming, several shrubs half-clothed and shivering. The garden has two stalwart mums in bloom and new growth: columbine and pinks just up from the ground, thanks to that long Indian Summer in October and a warm November.

There are even patches of new grass since the last mow. And on the curb, mountains of leaves awaiting the post-holiday leaf pickup. I took a chilly walk into town for fresh air and to shake off any post-holiday blues. All the time now I am buoyant on an ocean of joy, a calm ocean in this metaphor.

And now a time of advent is coming, that death of the year that makes us put up lights and bring out candles. Soon I'll begin my own incessant playing of "In the Bleak Midwinter." Pink Martini's Joy to the World. Blind Boys of Alabama singing "Go Tell it on the Mountain." The Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Lost Christmas Eve. New this year, thanks to a gift last year, Tori Amos, Midwinter Graces.

I love Christmas music! But then, I haven't been out shopping yet. And may not go out shopping at all!

Emotional Opinion

2011-11-27T08:50:00.000-06:00

Ah, I like this definition of poetry as "emotional opinion," which I found in Ruth Stone's obituary in the New York Times. She died at 96, so she had a good (I hope) long life, though filled with sorrow and struggle. A poet's life.

I read her book In the Next Galaxy last year and will seek out her others, gradually, if I can bear it. The obituary quotes from a couple of the poems about her husband's suicide, and here's another set of lines: "What is imperative is the Off switch; / which he, at one point some time ago, / opted for himself." She opted to live, and to write, and I am glad of it, but now the Off switch has been flicked for her.

Also sad to learn of the death of biologist Lynn Margulis, a favorite of mine. She was a trailblazer in evolution-ary theory, proposing symbiosis as one path to new life forms, not just random mutation. She allows for a kind of altruism as the basis of life, not just selfish survival, as evolution is so often interpreted, and her definition of "altruism" is, likewise, not the selfish conventional one in biology, which reduces it. That is, to preserve life itself, Margulis suggested, two organisms may share materials and give up their own lives, which is different in essence from those who say the organism is simply desperately trying to save itself and randomly produces something new. Since, in both cases, this is an unthinking intention, as far as we know, someone might say it is just two ways of seeing/stating the same thing. Fine. But they are importantly different ways of seeing/stating, with ramifications beyond biology, and Margulis's own research provided evidence at first rejected, now accepted in mainstream evolutionary theory.

Not surprisingly, she is also the mother of Gaia theory, which should interest and please some science fiction lovers, and was once married to Carl Sagan ("billions and billions" of stars).

And one more recent loss: Shelagh Delaney, the author of the play A Taste of Honey. I am thankful that these women lived and wrote, teaching us what to value and how to live, which, as always, is why I read.

And thanks, again, to Jonathan Koch, for the persimmons, pears, and mandarin.

Thanks and Praise

2011-11-23T07:38:00.000-06:00

I wake early. Unless I stayed up too late watching the Star Trek movie with my kids. Then I might loll in bed for a half hour, awake but pondering life. I love when I wake in joy. Waking in anxiety, or in nothingness, tends to happen at 3:00, or 3:03, or 3:06. An excellent time to read a book. But, hey, what isn't an excellent time to read a book?

This morning I woke remembering to post Poems of Thanks and Praise over at Escape Into Life, a mini-anthology of lovely poems by 4 poets whose names link to their solo features there. It has gorgeous art by Christy Lee Rogers, reminding us of the glory and beauty of the human body and the eternal dance. Of the swirls of water and air and color everywhere in our lives. And the darkness always in the background.

And there is a quiet political statement in the center of her feature in a piece called The Promise that seems terribly pertinent this particular Thanksgiving in America, when many are hungry and suffering, or fearful and uncertain; when many are actively protesting injustice; when many are still not seeing or solving the problem; when a few keep a brutal hold on the money, power, and status quo. I'd like to see us instead come together in a feast of thanksgiving and peace. But I see that the promise holds the shape of a V, as for Victory, and remains open to interpretation.

Please enjoy the poems of thanks and praise of Susan Rich, Richard Jones, Maureen E. Doallas, and Robert Lee Brewer, and escape into your beautiful life.

Bravo, Farewell

2011-11-22T10:22:00.000-06:00

This beautiful magazine, the fall issue of Confrontation, arrived in the mail this morning, with a poem of mine in it. For that honor, I give thanks. The cover art is a detail from a painting by Claudio Bravo, called Red, Rose and Orange Paper, courtesy of the Marborough Gallery in New York. Bravo's art is featured inside as well in a color portfolio at the center of the magazine, beautifully done.

Alas, Bravo died this summer in Morocco, where he made his home. He was Chilean, and his work was shown all over the world. I am glad he had a long life, and that his art had come to this "crescendo," as Edward J. Sullivan puts it in his essay in Confrontation.

I look forward now to reading the poems and stories in this issue! So far I have allowed myself the prizewinning poem by Zoe Donaldson, "Nonesuch," a gentle elegy and a villanelle.

I will also allow myself some pumpkin bread this morning, as I have baked loaves for Thanks-giving gatherings and an extra loaf for us to eat now, and some pumpkin muffins with cream cheese frosting...but those are to take to Phyllis, home from surgery and rehabilitation just in time for the holiday.

A Handy Image

2011-11-21T09:43:00.001-06:00

As I had hoped and predicted, the subject in church yesterday was the sheep and the goats on the left and right hands of God in Matthew 25:31-46, and you can read it here, in the Reflecting Pool. It is written by Bob Ryder, the husband half of the powerhouse duo that is Our Double Pastor, aka the s/he unit. I am comforted by Bob's suggestion that division into sheep and goats is "a handy image," not a casting of aspersion onto goats, whom I dearly love for their drunken goat cheese. (See handy image at left hand of blog.)

Though I did not attend church that morning, Matthew turned up at the kitchen table during the poetry workshop, as we tracked down a reference to "Rachel weeping for her children" in one of the poems, a New Testament Rachel (common name) weeping after Herod's murder of the children.

All too timely, this harming of the innocent by those protecting the powerful and the status quo. Sigh.... A reason to be blue on a Blue Monday, despite the beautiful blue sky. (See handy image at right hand of blog.)

Yet, in the midst of my country's current troubles, and trouble all over the world, I am thankful and full of praise and a sustaining joy as we enter Thanksgiving week. For those of you who celebrate this holiday, have a good one. I will probably post on into mid-week. If I am silent for a time, I am giving thanks with family.

How Did I Miss This?

2011-11-20T08:33:00.000-06:00

Much as I love my church, today I will probably stay home from it. (Fortunately, I can read the reflection online at the Reflecting Pool later. Or sooner, as s/he sometimes posts it before s/he says it!) (Yes, my pastor is a female/male unit.)

My son has come home for Thanksgiving, and it's my daughter's birthday weekend, and I feel homey. And thankful.

Plus, I can reflect right now on this post by The Bloggess: God and Jesus. It's like when your parents get on Facebook.

Shall Not Perish

2011-11-19T08:41:00.000-06:00

It's true that I get a lot of my news from NPR and Comedy Central (via Hulu). So I often get it highlighted and/or a day late.

Or on Facebook, via links to timely stuff in various publications. It's random but not more biased than Fox News--indeed, much less so, as I can glean from clips from Fox News on The Colbert Report.

My scatter shot method works rather well in keeping me informed and exposing me to a variety of points of view. It is a far cry, of course, from my days at the City News Bureau, where my job was to read the paper--several papers, every single day, and clip the leading news stories, especially local, to have background information to give to reporters who called in for it so they could understand the context for what they were covering that day, and to flesh out the story for their readers, as needed.

Today various things come together on the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln's famously succinct speech at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery in Gettysburg, PA. In honoring the dead, Lincoln also encouraged us to recommit to democracy itself and make sure that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." I think the Occupy movement is another instance of this, a reminder "by the people, and for the people" that the "government of the people" ought to remember its purpose and not favor the rich nor continue to rig the system toward the advantage of the few.

Comic and cosmic ironies are the specialty of sweet Stephen Colbert, whose feature "The Word" on November 17 pointed to the idiocy of a Super Congress who would take health benefits from the 1%, meaning veterans, to help balance the budget, instead of taxing the 1%, meaning the super rich, which would be fairer.

Meanwhile, on The Daily Show, Sarah Vowell came on to remind us of Evacuation Day, November 25, when the last of the British troops left Manhattan, marking the very end of the American Revolutionary War. Many of us are unaware of that former holiday, as it was taken over by Thanksgiving, as Vowell notes, humorously casting the blame on Abraham Lincoln, the same guy who did not want us to forget the Civil War dead and what they had done for us.

And for another interesting war connection and collection of observations on what's going on today and how it fits into a historical context, please visit Confessions of Ignorance on the Bonus Army, a World War I soldiers' protest during the Great Depression...

The winding and layering of our stories somehow also coincides with Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, a documentary film about the songwriter, and his story of a great general who suddenly sees the truth about war, with a Lincoln-like melancholic awareness, but is reminded by Krishna that he is a warrior and must do his work and be what he is, anyway, though all these people will die, including himself. What are we to do?

We shall perish. What shall not?

Presumed Dead

2011-11-18T12:07:00.000-06:00

Speak of the devil! Or the "presumed dead," as I sometimes mark poetry submissions that have been gone far too long. I refer here to the submission, or even the magazine itself, not to my poems. Many of my poems may be presumed dead, too, but I can resurrect them, or, egad, cannibalize them, and voila! new poems, or, rather, the poems they were probably always meant to be.

In What Counts, a recent blog entry on tallying submissions, rejections, acceptances, etc., I referred to the "presumed dead" that I try to deal with responsibly by inquiring about and then officially withdrawing. Today I finally received back in the mail my self-addressed stamped envelope with 5 poems submitted August 26, 2010--so, a year and 3 months ago--with a nice, handwritten note apologizing for the delay and ending, "Best of luck, & try us again."

It's been an emotional morning. I finished Home, by Marilynne Robinson, and wept. Why? It's hard to explain, but I think I wept at the beauty, the mystery, the love, and the hope. OK. Read it yourself, then, as in read it and weep.

And I've been listening to Leonard Cohen songs all morning while baking red velvet cupcakes for my daughter's birthday. It's the beauty again, in Cohen, and the raw truth. Hearing them in the light of Home was almost unbearable, in a good way. Cooking, without Cohen, might have been unbearable in a bad way.

And speaking of Joan of Arc and the song of Bernadette...that is, Leonard Cohen songs...what you see above are some exotic angels from this website, with info about them. I found some exotic angels recently at my grocery store and took them to a friend in the hospital, and then they were marked down, tempting me terribly, so I got some for myself, too. Mine are a paler yellow and a paler orange than these but similarly beautiful.

Here's another website with info "all about exotic angel plants," the name for a variety of houseplants trademarked by Hermann Engelmann Greenhouses of Florida, and I was glad to learn that some are begonias, what I had guessed about my own, based on leaf and stem. I had been afraid to Google "exotic angels," so finding solid plant info instead of scantily-dressed dancers or Victoria's Secret models, or worse, was a comfort!

Not that there's anything wrong with exotic dancing or fancy bras.

Gather Ye Rosebuds

2011-11-17T12:14:00.000-06:00

The rosebuds I gathered on Sunday while pruning the church garden have opened in a little bowl on my kitchen table, I am glad to say!

And I cut back the blooming mums at just the right time, too, the purple ones with yellow centers, as everything was nipped with frost again last night. So the mums are in a crystal vase, a wedding present nearly 22 years ago!

This painting, by John William Waterhouse, in the public domain, is titled Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May, a quotation from the poem by Robert Herrick about enjoying youth and beauty while you can.

Today, another "bright sunshiny day" but colder than yesterday, I celebrate ekphrasis (poetry in response to painting) in addition to this painting in response to a poem! Ekphrasis journal, which gave me the Ekphrasis Prize for my poem "Repose," has honored and delighted me again by now nominating it for a Pushcart Prize. I am so grateful to editors Laverne Frith and Carol Frith for this special attention to my poem. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Bright Sunshiny Day

2011-11-16T08:59:00.000-06:00

It's another bright sunshiny day out there today, so I've got this Johnny Nash song running through my head: "I Can See Clearly Now." I'm not sure I can see clearly now, about all things, but I'd like to, and I do have some perspective on a few things. Wouldn't it be nice to become a true elder, a repository of some of the wisdom of the ages? Sigh...

But now, thanks to the word "clear," I've also got the song "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" running in my head, sung by Barbra Streisand, though I don't know if I've ever actually seen the film all the way through. Is there a scene with Barbra standing like a figurehead singing on a ship? The plot of the film and the play involve clairvoyance, based on reincarnation.

Clearer in my head, is a scene from the play version, with Barbara Harris, played live on television, in black and white, probably as a promotion for the Broadway show. Fuzzier in my head is how and why I viewed this recently. Barbara Harris is an utterly charming performer, and a wacky one! The play, a musical, as is the film, is sort of loosely based on Berkeley Square, a sort of time travel adventure, so the layering and reincarnating just keep going on, not increasing my clairvoyance, but definitely enhancing the origami of my brain.

For more bright sunshine, plus clarity, wisdom, rust, and high heels, see this guest blog post by poet Karen J. Weyant at Escape Into Life!

Then Again

2011-11-15T07:44:00.000-06:00

Yes, I had a "driveway moment" listening to this NPR interview with Diane Keaton about her new book, Then Again. Today is its release date, so you can order it at Amazon. It's a memoir about her life with her mother, who kept journals and supported her children in their artistic aspirations.

I had forgotten that Diane Keaton's real last name is Hall and learned that she was known as "Dianie" growing up. Hence, Annie Hall, the role in the film that made her so famous!

What a sweet book this sounds like, a way to capture her mother's life, lost gradually to Alzheimer's and finally to death, but not lost at all. And Diane Keaton sounds as charming as ever!

Pruning Roses

2011-11-14T13:38:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was fall clean-up day at the church garden. I remembered thick gloves, and could not fit my rake into my car, so I was given the job of cutting back the roses. Happy to do it. I should have worn longer, thicker sleeves, but no harm done. I took a windbreaker but did not need a coat at all, after all, thanks to the warm weather. The wind was feisty but the roses are in an enclosed area.

After the fact, I read this advice on pruning roses from the All-America Rose Selections (rose.org) website, but, if I remember, I can apply this to my own trellis roses, in late winter, as they recommend. Perhaps a little later than January or February in my weather/gardening zone, depending on the actual conditions this winter and...global warming.

Meanwhile, I am pruning poetry, always a good idea. And still reading and marveling at Home, by Marilynne Robinson. I admire the subtlety and focus, the attention to the inner life.

Today I gasped at this, a description of the "black sheep" of the family, or prodigal son, Jack:

The brightness in his face meant anxiety. When he was anxious a strange honesty overtook him. He did understandable things for understandable reasons, answering expectation in terms that were startlingly literal, as if in him the skeletal machinery of conventional behavior, the extension and contraction of the pulleys of muscle and sinew, was all exposed.

I am like this, too, so I identify with Jack, though not a black sheep nor a prodigal son. In terms of life narrative, I am more like Jack's sister, Glory, the good girl who came home to tend her father, after some trouble away from home. But not trouble of Jack's sort, as the paragraph goes on:

And he was aware of this, embarrassed by it, inclined to pass it off, if he could, as irony, to the irritation of acquaintances and strangers, and, she [his sister, Glory] could only imagine, employers and police.

I am aware of and embarrassed by my own excruciating honesty and transparency and tendency always to make things worse by way of this awareness, so that everything I do is the "wrong" thing, only reinforcing the conventional expectations of those who find me in the wrong. There's no way out. But what a comfort to find a character to identify with in this, and an author who understands it.

But more than that, the man was at once indecipherable and transparent. Of course they watched him.

That is, in the moments after their conventional expectations about his wrongness are confirmed, he is his usual transparent, indecipherable self, and I think I strike some of my friends and acquaintances this way, too. May they forgive me. I have, I hope, a good heart.

Blue roses thanks to Wikipedia and Wikimedia! And Christopher Goodband.

The Third Servant

2011-11-13T18:11:00.001-06:00

Ah, my excellent pastor has sent me back to my bible (King James version, blue cover), Matthew 25:14-30, the story of the three servants, which comes right after the story of the ten virgins, five of them foolish and without lamp oil.

Here is Susan's account of "The Third Servant--Coward or Hero?" at the Reflecting Pool. I very much appreciated her historical reminder that the listeners at this time would not have identified with either master or slave, and would not have approved of "usury," or interest (money making money), or "ursury," as it is spelled in my King James version.

What struck me on this third reading was that the master gave his slaves each 5 talents, 2 talents, or 1 talent "to every man according to his several ability," an odd reversal of communism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. (A talent is a huge unit of money, also important in Cleopatra's time!)

And also that these verses are followed by the famous sheep and goats verses, which might tempt someone to connect the sheep on the right hand with rich usurious slaves and the goats on the left hand with the poor one-talent slave sent off to weep and gnash his teeth. Watch out for temptation, I'd say. I suspect that this is a contrast, not a comparison, this sheep and goats business, or a completely new metaphor, nothing to do with slaves or virgins!

Anyhoo, Susan pointed out this section of Matthew often shows up during the fall stewardship campaign at a church, and she did not use it that way. Instead, she challenged herself and us to think of it in light of current events (Occupy Wall Street) and local protests (against high interest rates on payday lending) and/or not in light of that, but for its own sake.

What are we to glean from such a parable?

I glean a warning similar to that of Philip Levine, the current poet laureate of the United States and a champion of the working person. He is a feisty troublemaker, as you can see in this interview in the New York Times Magazine, and a courageous man, not at all afraid to say what he thinks. A "slave" to no one.

"There’s a kind of Protestant ethic that believes that if you’re really a good person, God will reward you with a full table and a garage full of automobiles and a beautiful husband or wife — that we should be judged by what the world has delivered to us," says Levine, and I see that as a typical and problematic interpretation of the story of the third servant, as if 1) we are supposed "create wealth" given to us by an unjust, "hard man," a master of slaves and/or 2) we are to be judged by our apparent privilege, luck, and wealth, by our goods and not our deeds or our intent. Sigh.... But the parable in Matthew is very rich, and very open to interpretation, however conveniently it may be used by anyone to make a point or justify a particular way of life. Eh?

What Counts

2011-11-12T07:37:00.000-06:00

This morning, after all the delight of yesterday's 11/11/11 Nerd New Year, I am pausing to take count of things in my writing life. (This, you will recognize immediately, is a delay tactic to avoid 1) dusting 2) laundry 3) a crucial cleaning-out of the giant purse, in which I hope to find that missing slim volume of poetry I am supposed to be reviewing...).

I am right on track in the 1 Year, 100 Rejections project begun on September 1. The aim is to send out enough work to earn 100 rejections, and here in the "first" quarter (Sept., Oct., Nov.) I have sent out 25 packets, and we are only halfway through November, a nice cushion in case of a later slump. I've had 11 rejections since September 1, 2 acceptances, and the rest are still pending. In the meantime, of course, there have been rejections, acceptances, and publication of work sent out earlier--including a couple nice surprises.

Also, as we approach year's end, I am tidying up by officially withdrawing poems from places that have exceeded their usual reporting time, or marking others as "presumed dead" if even the withdrawal process seems not to matter here. In the Accepted folder, awaiting publication, are 15 poems yet to appear in fall, winter, and spring publications. And I'm doing a pretty good job of sending more when a publication says, "Please send more."

Meanwhile, in the blog, hedgehogs still lead the pack, with 80,471 hits on "Hedgehog Hodgepodge." My origami brain still runs second and has no hope of catching up. Posts with picture of bananas and mousetraps are also very popular. And, alas, thanks to the earthquake in Oklahoma, there has been a surge of interest in Tim Hunt's poetry chapbook, Fault Lines.

And, thanks to genetics, my cholesterol count is still high, so I have to take one statin pill a day, at night, and can no longer eat grapefruit.

OK, the family will wake soon...so I am off to take care of what counts.

Nerd New Year

2011-11-11T10:29:00.000-06:00

Happy Veterans Day and Happy Nerd New Year (11/11/11, with my hope being to post my doubled good wishes at 11:11 a.m., my time). You can celebrate and donate to charity here, at Nerd New Year, right on up to 11:11 p.m.

Meanwhile, thanks for everything to the veterans and the nerds.

I’m reading Home, finally, by Marilynne Robinson, the companion book to Gilead, a book I loved. I have to read things at the right time, and this is the right time.

I am powerfully moved by her quiet, character-driven prose. Here we are in Glory’s point of view, via third person limited omniscience:

Maybe great sorrow or guilt is simply to be accepted as absolution, like revelation. My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. His crime was his punishment, which had to mean he wasn’t such a villain after all.

I’m not going to make my 11:11 posting time, as I have to run out now…

Once again, Happy Veterans Day and Happy Nerd New Year.

Three-Quarter Time

2011-11-10T18:50:00.001-06:00

I fall in love with singers, usually female, all the time. I never fall out of love, but I do play certain female singer/songwriters over and over, then make myself move on, in order not to make too much of a fool of myself and/or drive my family crazy,* and then, inevitably, I return to my infatuation at a later date.

I am infatuated again with Eddi Reader, a Scottish folksinger. I first heard her on Acousticity, a program on WGLT, the local NPR affiliate, singing “Jamie, Come Try Me,” from her CD Eddi Reader Sings the Songs of Robert Burns. After that, and “Ae Fond Kiss,” I was in love with Eddi Reader (and Robert Burns, of course, whom I had met in high school) forever.

*Have I mentioned that I must listen to music in order to cook? My family always forgives my infatuations.

Currently I am listening to Angels & Electricity and obsessing on the song “Wings on My Heels,” which I think of, fondly, as “Three-Quarter Time.”

To quote Eddi Reader:

(and please hear this in three-quarter time!):

I never was too good at dancing

somewhere I’d step out of line

but I knew that I had

wings on my heels

when they played

in three-quarter time

I love that line “somewhere I’d step out of line” for its rebellious as well as its self-deprecating qualities. And I’m sort of OK at dancing! What I was never too good at was math.

As the song continues, the local boys have a lot of swagger but then they “hold on for dear life / when they played in three-quarter time.” Love that.

To continue with Eddi Reader:

one by one

they pulled down those mirrored halls

one by one

the winters came forgetting names

This may comfort me as winter comes.

To return to Eddi Reader (and Boo Hewerdine):

money might slip through my fingers

and there won’t be much to call mine

but I’ll know that I had

wings on my heels

when they played

in three-quarter time

This may make ¾ sense, but, with full joy, I say, “Happy full moon!”

Public Space

2011-11-09T08:59:00.000-06:00

"We're number one! We're number one!" This morning, in addition to my ongoing job as poetry cheer-leader, I get to be a cheer-leader for my hometown. Beautiful Uptown Normal--specifically its beautiful green space traffic circle, part of a major downtown renovation over the past several years--is #1 of the Top 100 public spaces in the U.S. and Canada, over at Smart Planet, via a "crowdsourced survey." Close-up and distance shots of the circle at the link!

Meanwhile, the surreal "public space" with balloons you see here is art by Michal Giedrojc that accompanies the new poetry feature--Sherry O'Keefe--just up at Escape Into Life. O'Keefe is a wildly busy editor as well as a poet, and I am glad to have bumped into her in the virtual world, where bumps are as light as balloon volleyball bumps!

And that should bump us on though the hump of this week!

Insane Grain

2011-11-08T12:53:00.000-06:00

You say it's a Fat Tuesday in the blog? I say it still looks like Rainy Day & Monday to me, but in the 60s, so just fine out there!

You say not to go grocery shopping when hungry? I say that's why I came home first after the fasting blood test and ate breakfast before I went grocery shopping!

You say to avoid cholesterol? I say Insane Grain has no cholesterol in it, only corn & salt & (uh oh) partially hydrogenated soybean oil. But at least no HFCS (high fructose corn syrup).

My current crop of Insane Grain came from Candace, with the return of a borrowed book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. I am halfway through it, and now I'll read the rest.

Insane Grain is, as you see, a Beer Nuts product, so you can get some here. I did not have beer as part of this nutritional breakfast. I didn't have Insane Grain, either. I had pumpkin bread. But I am going to have some Insane Grain now, because it's lunchtime.

And Fat Tuesday in the blog! Brought to you by circular thinking!

Rainy Days and Mondays

2011-11-07T13:36:00.000-06:00

Because, yes, it is a rainy day and a Monday. A Blue Monday, to be exact.

Imaginary background music: "Rainy Days and Mondays," sung by the Carpenters, song by Roger S. Nichols and Paul H. Williams

Go here for full lyrics and if you want "Rainy Days and Mondays" as a ringtone.

And here are Karen Carpenter and Richard Carpenter at the White House, with Richard Nixon cut out of the public domain photo. As he should be.

Me, I'm just coping with the first line of the song: "Talkin' to myself and feeling old." I don't think that feeling's going away, but I will try to stop talking to myself.

Me: But why do you also have an open tab up with the lyrics to "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead?"

Me: I don't know. Different writing task?

Me: Could be. Why would anybody be interested in your answer to that question?

Me: I don't know. Why did you ask?

Me: I don't know. Just feeling hurluberlue, I guess!

Cinq vièrges hurluberlues

2011-11-06T17:39:00.002-06:00

Hurluberlues? Well, that's what it said in French when I tried to track down the five virgins from Matthew, the subject of today's reflection in church, and specifically "The Five Virgins," a poem by Thomas Merton.

You can read about them here, in "Bridesmaids Revisited," by Susan Ryder, who tastefully avoids any reference to the recent film Bridesmaids. (Unlike me.) The text of the poem (in English) is there, too.

However, Merton's bridesmaids (aka virgins, but the word for "virgin" back then pretty much meant "young woman" or "maiden," and hence quite a bit of confusion ever after) do arrive at the wedding on motor-scooters, with burned-out motors, having run out of gas.

In Matthew they had run out of oil for their lamps.

In Merton, these gals knew how to dance, so they were asked to stay!

Et voilà: il y avait

Cinq vièrges hurluberlues

Sans pétrole

Mais bien engagées

Dans le mouvement.

You've got to have bridesmaids at a wedding! Especially hurluberlues ones--"foolish" or "scatterbrained."

If it must be known, I am 1) not a virgin 2) quite hurluberlue.

Geographer of Bliss

2011-11-05T07:37:00.000-05:00

If you are a regular reader, you know I'm in a book group and we are reading The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner. We'll get together to discuss it next week, and I already know some of us love it (me) and some of us don't like it very much because 1) "I won't ever be able to go to those places" and/or 2) Weiner is sort of whiny, as he is well aware and mentions in the book. I love his kind of whiny.

Anyhoo, at this point in our monthly-book game, I sometimes send along some questions for people to ponder as they finish up their reading or do a little re-reading (which I often have to do, having read some other books in the meantime).

So, because it is Slattern Day in the blog, and I am a slattern not planning to clean my house or do anything very productive today (oh, except that job interview), here are my previously typed questions for the book group, which cheered a couple of us yesterday in the surgery waiting room of a local hospital where one of us was actually having surgery. (It went well.) Generally, hospital rooms, waiting rooms, surgery and recovery rooms are not the happiest places to be, of course, but there was morphine. And a piano player: hymns + the "making whoopee" song.

Geography of Bliss Questions

Which country/countries appealed to you most?

Was that primarily due to the geography, climate, personality of the place, or the chapter title* attached to it?

*Chapter titles, for your convenience:

The Netherlands: Happiness is a Number

Switzerland: Happiness is Boredom

Bhutan: Happiness is a Policy

Qatar: Happiness is a Winning Lottery Ticket

Iceland: Happiness is Failure

Moldova: Happiness is Somewhere Else

Thailand: Happiness is Not Thinking

Great Britain: Happiness is a Work in Progress

India: Happiness is a Contradiction

America: Happiness is Home

Which country would you least like to visit, besides Moldova, a no-brainer, and why?

If you would like to go to Moldova, what is wrong with you?

Which countries appealed to you, even if you would not want to visit there, and why?

Have you been to any of these countries? If so, how did your experience compare/contrast to Eric Weiner’s?

Is Eric Weiner any relation to Anthony Weiner. If so, why?

A fun place to visit: [Eric Weiner's website]

While there, you can tell Eric Weiner about your own happiest places, here.

What would make you happy, wherever you are?

What is the relationship between happiness and place?

The Jackal at the Door

2011-11-04T07:46:00.000-05:00

OK, I am in love now with Eleanor Lerman, who wrote this book of poems, The Sensual World Re-Emerges. It had been on my wish list for a while, and, yes, I judged a book by its jackal-headed cover, and I read it now, end of October, beginning of November, at the end of my first surge of Cleopatra research (for a project next October!) I quoted from Lerman's days-of-the-week poem in yesterday's blog entry.

You can learn about more Eleanor Lerman here, her own web site, which lists her books, and where I was pleased to find her new novel, Janet Planet, from Mayapple Press. I had seen the cover (wolf head floating on crescent moon) visiting Mayapple before, but this time I got smacked in the head with it.

The Egyptian God Anubis wore a jackal head and was associated with mummification and the afterlife. (Thank you, Wikipedia, and thank you, Wikimedia, for the free-use images!) Lerman's poems have death and worry lurking in them and are also hilarious, often, so I am gripped with fear and haunted by...a weird vicious delight while reading them. They speak with an odd floating urgency.

They also give me something to be cranky about in the proofreading department. Just like my mom, I find myself reading with a pencil and making little corrections—adding a "d" here, deleting a "y" there, and shuddering at the use of "lightening" for "lightning." Once again, I ask, "Why, why isn't an editor doing this?" How can a fine book of poems like this get out into the world with errors like that? (And I don't know who to blame, a proofreader or the lack of a proofreader, or a copy editor who introduced the errors instead of correcting them...and why am I so darn persnickety?)

The lack of periods also drives me a little crazy, but that is a clear choice so I tell myself it has something to do with the meaning and the inextricability of form and content of poetry. I choose to think the lack of periods adds to the eerie floating quality in these poems. And sort of suggests immortality or afterlife

**please note lack of period above**

Alphabetical Shelving

2011-11-03T08:14:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, as I was re-shelving The Alchemist's Kitchen, by Susan Rich, on my poetry bookshelves, after pulling it out to re-read a certain poem, I noticed I was putting her back next to Rilke, thanks to alphabetical shelving. "How nice to be shelved next to Rilke," I said in my head, where I have frequent conversations.

On my particular poetry shelves, she has Ezra Pound on her left flank, a little more abrasive.

So then I wondered who I would be shelved between were my books and journals not all over there on their own bookcase, now full, so I guess I can't publish anymore poems. Heh. Sigh. Thank goodness for online journals! Anyhoo, I would be between Galway Kinnell and Carolyn Kizer. Not bad at all!

Not all of my books are alphabetized, or not all by author. My personal bookcase is alpha-betized by title of journal or anthology, with my freestanding books slid in at "K" or lying atop the stacked books if used recently for a reading or a reference (as yesterday when a composer friend called in need of some lyrics!). In addition, not all of the journals fit, sizewise, on this shelf, Kaleidoscope, for example, a "K" journal, and Ninth Letter, and Seeding the Snow, so they are in various other places tall enough for them, or supportive enough, as Kaleidoscope and Seeding the Snow are tall and saddle-stapled.

Elsewhere in the room are little stacks of books in what we might call random organization, helped up by bookends, with handmade dividers identifying them as waiting to be reviewed for Fiddler Crab, Prick of the Spindle, or Rattle, for instance, or lying atop the poetry shelves to be read, which is gently italicized on my brain. And a couple of books are 1) temporarily lost in the piles on my desk and computer desk and/or 2) in process.

One of these is The Sensual World Re-Emerges, by Eleanor Lerman, and today, waiting for the computer to warm all the way up, I opened the book to my bookmark and read the poem "The Days of the Week are Explained To Me," which, as a blogger who writes "eight days a week" is 1) right up my alley and 2) urgently necessary.

How wonderful that it says, "Plans / can be made on Thursday, next steps / mapped out." How reassuring! And also apt, as I have a meeting today to talk out some "next steps."

Ah, but how disconcerting, the next stanza: "Therefore, she [the friend explaining the days of the week to the speaker of the poem, who is now the friend explaining the days of the week to random me] suggests, if we / intend to get anything done, / we must meet on Tuesday, / in a sober cafe, with sharpened / pencils and clean white pads..."

We are meeting in a "sober cafe," for coffee. It is only open for breakfast and lunch and serves no alcohol!

But Lerman continues, accessing "zero at the bone" chills for someone like me, and keeping me honest:

as if we are normal people
with good intentions
As if we have the kind of jobs
where we are paid with money
As if in our vicious little hearts
we really want anything to change

More on Eleanor Lerman's book later. That's all I can handle today, a Random Coinciday on a Thor's Day, a rainy, vicious Thursday in the blog.

But with happy art by Mo Conlon, the paintings I Love This Rabbit, Sophia, and Joy Blessing, leading you to our Best of the Net Nominations at Escape Into Life.

Plan Your Epitaph Day

2011-11-02T07:00:00.000-05:00

My friend Susan, still 50 at her own blog, tells me it's Plan Your Epitaph Day. It's one of those bizarre holidays my friend Kim Kimmel also celebrates regularly in her hummus-based blog, where it was still Frankenstein Friday the last time I checked. The zany holidays tend to 1) be apocryphal and 2) move around, and Susan found one place that said Plan Your Epitaph Day is April 6 (so did I), and another place told me it was on November 1, leaving November 2 available for National Deviled Egg Day, but, here at Zany Holidays, and here on the Hump of the Week we can celebrate Plan Your Epitaph Day.

You can carve your own epitaph here, on this tombstone generator, but you won't be able to use an apostrophe (see above).

Of course, as a writer, I plan to be immortal but...you know...I still might go unsung, or have a bad accident first.

On the other hand, Anonymous is already pretty famous, and even has a feature film out there now!

Still, I'd rather be Shakespeare.

Anyhoo, have fun generating your own epitaph, and be careful out there. (Did I forget anything?)

Snickers

2011-11-01T11:35:00.000-05:00

Yes, there are a few fun-size Snickers bars left from Halloween, and of course I have to confess that because it is Fat Tuesday in the blog. If I end up fat, it's because too few trick-or-treaters found our tiny street.

But 1) we actually had a fine turnout this year! 2) the Lego kids came, along with various other adorable neighbor children; one was a carhop, and she brought not a bag but a tray! and 3) it's not good to blame trick-or-treaters or Snickers bars for my own lack of self-control when it comes to chocolate, nougat, peanut, and caramel, as pointed out in this fine rant and factual article from Today I Found Out! It tells us 1) the Snickers bar was named after a horse 2) the actual calorie count of a Snickers bar. And there's a recipe for Snickers pie.

It's November 1st, the start of National Novel Writing Month, so good luck to all those participating formally or informally by 1) writing a novel and/or 2) producing a certain word count per day toward a novel. If you want to officially participate, you can go here, to NaNoWriMo, to sign up. In April, they do Script Frenzy, and they also have a writing program for young people.

I just read Superior Donuts, a play by Tracy Letts, in which novel writing features! What a wonderful play. It takes place in Chicago, specifically Uptown, and I lived just north of there and recognize all the references. Plus, an actress I knew way back originated the role of Randy, a police officer, in Chicago and on Broadway, so I am delighted for her. My folks saw this in its original Chicago production at Steppenwolf, and loved it.

Is there such a thing as a snickers donut?

**pause to find out**

Yes, of course. At Krispy Kreme. Thanks to Yelp for the info and the photo. Yeah, Yelp, yeah, Krispy Kreme, thanks a lot.

**pause to inject selective memory erasure serum**

Poems That Scare Me

2011-10-31T07:23:00.001-05:00

Happy Halloween! I've got my fun-size Snickers bars in a grinning skeleton cup ready for tonight's trick-or-treaters, and Poems That Scare You up at Escape Into Life, so I'm set!

The paintings by Charles E. Williams II are beautiful on their own but scare me in the context of the poems, with their fear of water. Also I'm scared by the water moving into motion at the bottom of the painting, and transforming from water, which it isn't, into paint, which it is. Why should that scare me? I don't know!

Yesterday I gave my poetry workshop the assignment to "write a poem that scares you." Of course! But we were bolstered by our Snickers and red wine, so we survived.

If you are a poet, here you go:

Write a poem that scares you.

They tell us it’s good to write about our fears and obsessions, but it can also be scary! Make a list of things that scare you. Maybe a categorized list: things that scared you in childhood, in various stages of adulthood, and now. Notice what recurs, what stays.

Reflecting on the list, prewrite a series of sensory images, at least one for each sense, preferably more. Images, not metaphors—so all your senses are engaged in the physical and sensory here and now. And not clichéd (Halloweeny) scary images. The images might not be scary at all. Yet.

Zombieland

2011-10-30T19:55:00.000-05:00

Oh, God, I'm about to watch this movie with my son, to celebrate Halloween...Eve.

I don't like scary movies, unless they are funny. I'm thinking this will be plenty funny. It was between this and Shaun of the Dead, and I watched that recently, researching zombies for poetry.

In fact, I think I have seen part of Zombieland already, as I remember Bill Murray...but it's likely that I slept through part of it, which won't happen now, thanks to caffeine.

Unless I relapse into wine.

Pumpkin Bread

2011-10-29T15:45:00.000-05:00

I wish I could say I've been a true slattern on Slattern Day in the blog, but instead I baked pumpkin bread, from scratch, now in the oven,* at the request of my daughter.

Also I grilled many sandwiches--cheese, ham & cheese--at the request of my son, daughter, and husband. It is nice to have everyone home for Halloween weekend.

In addition, my parents are home safe from elder hostel in Missouri. Hmm, not that anything too terrible would happen to them in an elder hostel...but, well, you know.

Meanwhile, big winter snowstorms predicted for parts of the country while blue sky and gorgeous color continue here...

And the house smells so, so good.

*the importance of sentence structure. One false move, and my daughter might have been in the oven!

Brought to You By...

2011-10-28T08:32:00.000-05:00

My semi-imaginary friend Kim Kimmel would like to read a poem ending with the line "Let's don't screw this up."

Please see yesterday.

Please oblige her in the comments zone! Any topic, poem ends with her desired line.

You may play even if you don't identify yourself as a poet! It's Halloween weekend. You can wear an imaginary poet costume!

Occupy the Heart

2011-10-27T08:15:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I got a card in the mail, an actual handwritten letter. It was from a friend here in town, a retired man--in fact, the man who hired my father for the job he kept until his own retirement. I have been honored, since moving back to Normal, to meet and get to know this man I'd heard about when a child.

In his note, he quoted the closing lines of one of my poems:

Let us care for each other.
Let us care for this earth.

I was touched in so many ways. So today, as the Occupy Wall Street movement and its extensions continue across our country, and as some of the protesters are answered with violence and scorn, I ask us to occupy the heart. To care for each other.

To remember the past and the good and noble changes that have come from nonviolent protest here in the United States and all over our world.

Let's don't screw this up.

Halloween Weather

2011-10-26T08:09:00.000-05:00

It looks kind of like this in my back yard this morning. Misty, grayish yellow, and full of imaginary owls.*

I call it Halloween Weather.

Artist Kathleen Lolley calls it Moon Ritual, the painting, that is. Here is her artist feature at Escape Into Life, and she is the artist paired today with poems by Susan Slaviero. I met Susan briefly at a RHINO Reads poetry reading in Brothers K coffeeshop a couple years ago now (that long?!), and, as it is hard to hear poetry in a coffeeshop, I also sought out her work in print, found her blog and her magazine, etc., and am so glad to share some of her new poems at Escape Into Life!

But, yes, Halloween Weather is upon us, that shift to colder temps and lingering or likely precipitation. I always hope the Indian Summer will last through trick-or-treat time, and sometimes it does, but I have gone trick-or-treating in the snow, rain, and cold snappy wind, too, alas. My son's coming home from college this Halloween weekend. I doubt he will want to trick-or-treat, but I do have some fun size Snickers in the house, for him and any possible costumed visitors,* chosen in light of possible leftovers.

Hmm, no leftovers here.

Also, any leftover Snickers will be served to my poetry workshop on Sunday! Along with red wine. And, speaking of poetry, expect more scary poems, including another from Slaviero, on Halloween Monday in Escape Into Life, too. It's a mini anthology of poems that might scare you. They scared me.

For now, I leave you with Afternoon Frenzy, by Kathleen Lolley, something I hope not to witness in my own back yard. Remember, it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

*And on Monday, a trick-or-treater--or 4--might actually cross the back yard from their yard to get to the treats, but they might be dressed as Lego people!

Also, check this out! Ego Leonard, etc.!

Cleopatra and Emily Dickinson

2011-10-25T08:23:00.000-05:00

OK, I knew but had forgotten that Emily Dickinson's favorite Shakespeare play was Antony and Cleopatra. I've run into this again in my Cleopatra project research. Emily called her sister-in-law "Cleopatra" and connected her to the Crown Imperial (Fritillaria imperialis), a tall, queenly, spring flower.

In The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, Judith Farr reports on Dickinson's frightening eye trouble, during which reading was forbidden: "It was reading Shakespeare that she most missed; as soon as her doctor's ban was lifted, she opened Antony and Cleopatra."

Imaginary background music: "Walk Like an Egyptian," The Bangles.

More random coincidii: Because it is October, I needed to watch To Kill a Mockingbird again. There's an early scene in which Jem walks like an Egyptian because of what he's studying at school!

Fritillaria images thanks to Wikimedia Commons. First in public domain; second (Antony and Cleopatra drooping together!) via Creative Commons.

And because Tootsie was right next to To Kill a Mockingbird on the shelf, I've seen that again, too, learning something new this time that, oddly, ties in with yesterday's wild animals dream, and tootsie rolls, a fine Halloween treat, and perfect for a Fat Tuesday in the blog.

Wild Animals

2011-10-24T09:18:00.000-05:00

This morning I woke from a dream about wild animals escaping from an open preserve, oddly set in an open-door classroom down the hall from another large classroom in a large institution. I woke with a headache--in the dream ascribed to a bear that was attacking us--and realized it was because of dehydration, the furnace now on. We escaped the bear by going into the other classroom, and closing the door by lifting up the hinged doorstop, which I managed through panic even though it is the kind of thing I cannot usually accomplish in dreams.

Those of you who follow the news will find it easy to interpret my dream based on the recent escape and slaughter of wild animals in Ohio, but I was not aware of that news at all until this morning, preoccupied on the day it was happening by local grief, the death of a dog named Wolf.

If you, too, missed that news, here is one of the recent stories about it. (I am not going to show any pictures of the dead animals, but they are out there.) This is a sad, sad thing, and surely better laws, education*, and awareness will result.

*Is this why my dream was set in an educational institution?

Meanwhile, I wondered about the impact of this event on a new movie due out for Christmas, We Bought a Zoo, based on a book about a real family who did this in England. Of course, the Wall Street Journal wondered the same thing, meaning economic impact, in their Speakeasy blog, in this piece, titled "Will the Exotic Animal Slaughter in Ohio Hurt the Movie 'We Bought a Zoo'?"

The money aspect occurred to me, too, but I was mainly wondering about the tact issue, the shared concern over the welfare of animals, etc., and the charm of the movie as presented in the trailer I saw at The Big Year (the film about birders that just opened). I told my friend Kim Kimmel, mother of Wolf the dog, how glad I was of a nice family film coming out at Christmastime, etc. So now I'm hoping the movie will help with the education and awareness aspect and the revive the animals in joy.

Sigh...it's Blue Monday in the blog.

Trailing Clouds of Glory

2011-10-23T08:07:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had the sweet experience of meeting with Basel Al-Aswad, the father of Chris Al-Aswad, the young man who founded Escape Into Life.

We spoke in Chris's house across from a cornfield, on a road that intersects significantly (and literally) with the road to my childhood home out in corn country here in central Illinois. I realized I had passed the house many times without knowing it when taking a certain route to drop my daughter off at school.

I saw, in real life, up close, the swan and family paintings and drawings of Rosalind Al-Aswad, Chris's mother, that I'd seen only online before. I saw Chris's office, his library, his Gogol...Dead Souls.

I saw the sweet, quiet corner at the top of the stairs set apart for Buddhist meditation.

I am glad and grateful for this. Thank you, Basel.

And this morning, looking once more at the family's tribute to Chris--this article and the magazine itself--I looked again at Chris's handwritten excerpt from Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality...," a poem significant in my own youth in awakening my awe, for poetry and for everything.

I had again that little shock of recognition, having known but forgotten that Chris and I were moved by the same thing. He mentions intuition in one of his last journal entries, and his own sense of recognition that a life can lead to one inevitable discovery: "The best comparison is to a scholar or scientist who comes to discover that their life-work revolves around a single theme." I'll be pondering this all day, and thereafter.

Midnight in Paris

2011-10-22T08:20:00.000-05:00

I loved this movie!

Midnight in Paris.

Saw it last night with my parents at the Normal Theatre, our lovely little restored Art Deco moviehouse. Beautiful Uptown Normal was all lit up, the trees wrapped in bluish white and red mini-lights. Woody Allen is back! As a filmmaker. And Owen Wilson stars! Charming, charming.

I won't say more: 1) It's Slattern Day in the blog, so I don't have to say more 2) I want you to be taken by surprise!

We Love Our Animals

2011-10-21T11:45:00.000-05:00

Today, on Facebook, my son posted a picture of a cat wearing a chocolate PopTart.

Hard to explain.

"Do you have a cat?" I asked, via comment. I try to be unobtrusive on Facebook; it is already kind enough that my son agrees to "friend" me.

Friends close to home and "virtual" (online) friends have been suffering the illnesses and deaths of their pets. My heart goes out to them. I will miss a dog named Wolf.

And I miss and fondly remember some cats and dogs I have known and loved:

Calico
Dulcie (Dulcinea)
Germi
Buck
Dolly
Sammy
Thurber
Harper (Harper Lee when we thought he was a she)
Cheeks
Britney (named by the kids, only briefly with us, as she ate the chairs; she really does live on a farm now, and was born on a farm, so all is well)

If there is another pet in my future, it will be:

1) an accident (a stray taken in as we took in Harper and Cheeks)
2) an Airedale (trained by Virginia; re-trained by Bob)

3) a drunken goat

She Slumps There Shredding Documents

2011-10-20T07:59:00.000-05:00

I've been enjoying the blog and poems of Kristin Berkey-Abbott for some time now, and today I'll tell you a bit about her chapbook I Stand Here Shredding Documents. The title alludes to a famous Tillie Olsen short story, "I Stand Here Ironing," from her collection Tell Me a Riddle.

Berkey-Abbott's poetry chapbook handles themes and concerns similar to Olsen's--work life, the working person; women and their work lives, often domestic, or balancing domestic labors with other labors; women in family life. I Stand Here Shredding Documents is also a gentle, humorous, and pithy critique of contemporary life, particularly 20th- and 21st-century woman's place in it.

The opening poem, for example, notes the irony of wildly expensive kitchen remodeling projects and television cooking shows in "a culture that doesn't cook." In another, a fashion design student doesn't think she needs to know how to sew. What's important is the runway, the logo, the sexy slit. "Besides, [she's] a little afraid / of the sewing machine."

And of course today's working woman has left "her ancestors' farms" behind for the new crop of gas-guzzlers on their way to offices:

She looks across the lanes of cars,
row after row of metal husks,
pod after pod with precisely one person
per car, lying fertile,
waiting to blossom in the workplace.

Berkey-Abbott revisits myth and fairy tale to look at culture and her personal dilemmas, and also explores escape via "Alternate Career Path #1" ("chief bread baker / to the Abbess) and "Alternate Career Path #2 ("dessert chef / to the homeless"). I like her imaginary professions a lot--body and spirit nurtured and nurturing in both! She also gives herself and her readers the comic relief any of us might need after a long and tedious workday or day spent in "Meeting Hell," also a slightly dismembered sonnet!

I love her use of the mythological character of Penelope (here at her loom, as painted by Leandro Bassano), patiently weaving and unweaving her tapestry as she waits for her husband to come home, now displaced to the workplace as "Penelope in the Office Cubicle," where she makes and dismantles a work chart, makes and pours out coffee, and endlessly revises departmental objectives. What comes home is the meaninglessness of our modern work lives.

That is present in the title poem, too, which ends:

I am a woman of file cabinets
and endless meetings of infinite boredom.
I stand at the shredder,
my daily friend, and think of work
that is never finished.

But there's a sense in the book as a whole that some of the unfinished work is yet to come, after the regular workday, and isn't boring, and is meaningful, and it's here, woven into poems.