Blue Mesa

It's Blue Monday in the blog, and that's today's poem-a-day prompt, but I am not at all blue, and neither is the sky.

I have been re-reading Willa Cather, and am taken with this wonderful sentence, "His room opened onto the street, by a sky-blue door."  That's from "Tom Outland's Story," and so is this description of the mesa:

The Blue Mesa was one of the landmarks we always saw from Pardee--landmarks mean so much in a flat country. To the northwest, over toward Utah, we had the Mormon Buttes, three sharp blue peaks that always sat there. The Blue Mesa was south of us, and was much stronger in colour, almost purple. People said the rock itself had a deep purplish cast.  It looked, from our town, like a naked blue rock set down alone in the plain...

Sometimes I feel like a naked blue rock set down alone in the plain...

Later in the story, the sun comes up and goes down on the mesa:

It was light up there long before it was with us.  When I got up at daybreak and went down to the river to get water, our camp would be cold and grey, but the mesa top would be red with sunrise, and all the slim cedars along the rocks would be gold--metallic, like tarnished gold-foil. Some mornings it would loom up above the dark river like a blazing volcanic mountain. It shortened our days, too, considerably. The sun got behind it early in the afternoon, and then our camp would lie in its shadow. After a while the sunset colour would begin to stream up from behind it. Then the mesa was like one great ink-black rock against a sky on fire.

Oh, my. Gorgeous. I hope we can always see, care for, and appreciate such beauty here on our world. Cather is describing the Blue Mesa in New Mexico.  When I visit the National Park Service site for the Curecanti National Recreation Area of Colorado, I see that there will be no access to the Blue Mesa Reservoir in the case of a government shutdown.  Sigh... Numerous dilemmas. And I hope it is OK to share this beautiful picture of Blue Mesa Lake, which I found here.

I love "all the slim cedars..."  I love that "great ink-black rock against a sky on fire."

*****

April 11 poem-a-day prompt:  Blue Monday

Blue Abundance

Blue abundance continues on the back fence, with more morning glories opening each day, some climbing up the juniper tree, some up the volunteer mulberry, and many spreading across the neighbors' hedge, which is OK with the neighbors. I asked before dropping the seeds this spring. 

And I don't mind the clothesline in their back yard. Why would I? But, apparently, that's a thing--objecting to clotheslines--in some places. Sigh.... Speaking of clotheslines: "Clothesline." (I remembered this blue poem in Waccamaw this past spring.)

Not-so-imaginary soundtrack (meaning I was listening to these songs while cooking): "Blue of Blue" sung by Carly Simon on her Torch album, and Joni Mitchell's Blue album. It was a blue sky October day, one that got warmer but which caused us to turn on the furnace in the morning. I was a little blue about being old enough to be cold enough to turn on the furnace on October 14, but then I remembered they turn on the heat lamps on the el platforms in Chicago on October 1, and I was younger when I eagerly awaited that date, shivering on the platform, waiting for the A train. But that, too, shows how old I am, as now it's the Red Line, and the train stops at both A and B stations. (Maybe it's changed again. I've been away a while.)

Definitely-imaginary soundtrack: theme song from Gilligan's Island, the phrase "a three-hour tour," substituting "four" for "three." Yesterday I drove four hours round trip, taking our daughter back to college after a weekend visit home. So, yes, residual blue from that, hugging her at her dorm as we said goodbye again. But, you know, there is joy in all this blueness. Things are as they should be. It's good to grow up.

Teal Blues

Ah, Monday. Or Blue Monday, as we say in the blog... The sky, an actual bright blue this morning, has faded to a pale gray blue. Google has a coral and teal blue graphic in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. A box of 99 copies (eh? where's the other one?) of my new chapbook arrived on Friday, with a deep teal blue color cover (a little greener blue* than the blue that turns up in the Internet images here and here). I love it and am so grateful to have the book out there in time for the dance/theatre production in Ohio.

And both kids came home for the weekend, so I am a little blue at the farewells: one this morning, and one yet to come, tonight. My son had to go back to work, though he didn't have to teach this morning, so he had sunshine for the drive back to Chicago. We had a lovely time just hanging out together this weekend--watching movies, playing Pictionary and cards, sharing meals. It extended the winter holidays a bit. And now...the blues.

But I've had a surprising number of winter poem acceptances, so I'm off to a good start in 2014! And there's plenty of good news for others in my poetry circles: one won a major book award, another was named state poet laureate!

Plus, for breakfast, mini-blueberry turnovers. So maybe my mood will turn over, too!

*Ah, bluegreen was one of my favorite Crayola Crayon colors. And now there's also a teal blue.

Blue Notes & Mayapples

Day 292 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and I have been reading The Clock of the Long Now because Marion Boyer is a poet I've admired over the years.  We took her poems at RHINO, when I was an editor there, and I reviewed her chapbook Green (Finishing Line Press, 2003) for RHINO Reads (then a review section of the journal, now a live reading series), and several of those poems appear again in The Clock of the Long Now (Mayapple Press, 2009), notably the "Jake" poems, in the voice of an interesting man.

And that's just the beginning of the coincidii:

I do hope to review Clock for an online journal (not happy with the lag time of print journals when it comes to reviews, still waiting for a review of This Must Be the Place, by Alice George, also from Mayapple, to appear in ACM, and, like Alice's book, Marion's is from 2009, so I'd like to get it out there!)  Meanwhile, Susan Slaviero has agreed to answer interview questions about Cyborgia, her book from Mayapple, out this year.  So you can look forward to what she has to say--here in this blog!--about her fascinating book of wild science fiction poetry!

I met Marion Boyer once (or twice?) at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, where poets get to read their work surrounded by art by...yes, women!  And, yes, these blue-note birds are more in the series by Pamela Callahan, a Woman Made artist, for which I keep giving thanks!

A blue-sounding* poem of mine, "A House in Carlock," appears as Broadside #20 currently in Blue Fifth Review, which will be moving to Wordpress in 2011, and transforming into Blue Five Notebook, where I have a poem forthcoming!  I am honored to appear in the last Blue Fifth and the first Blue Five issues of editor Sam Rasnake.  Many thanks for this!

*And you can hear it, as there's a link to Poetry Radio, WGLT!

I met Susan Slaviero once, too, when we both read for the RHINO Reads series in Evanston, IL.  It's always delightful to get to hear a poet read her own work, and I am tickled that she will tell us all more about her cyborg women.

And if you want to see some beautiful blue water, painted by Deborah Van Auten, and hear "the sea's blue music," sung by Freya Manfred, click here to be taken to Escape Into Life.

Blue Hour

You already know the coincidence of blue here, from the title and color of the book cover, which is a photograph from the series "My Ghost" by Adam Fuss. But here is the August coincidence from Blue Hour, by Carolyn Forche (HarperCollins, 2003): "Our windows faced east, and on August evenings, the sky was a blue no longer spoken." And it's also a Blue Monday in the blog.

The "blue hour," as the helpful Notes at the end explain, is "the light the French call l'heure bleue, between darkness and day, between the night of a soul and its redemption, an hour associated with pure hovering." It is the hour she would wake with her baby son. From the title poem: "When my son was an infant we woke for his early feeding at l'heure bleue--cerulean, gentian, hyacinth, delft, jouvence. What were also the milk hours."

Other favorite lines and phrases, some blue: 

"In the blue silo of dawn, in earth-smoke and birch copse / where the river of hands meets the Elbe."

"a confusion of birds and fishes"

"a memory through which one hasn't lived"

"a moment of bluesmoke"

"l'heure bleue, hour of doorsteps lit by milk"

"pinning their intentions to a saint's dress"

"meaning did not survive that loss of sequence"

"something broken and personal, a memory"

"the stories nested, each opening to the next"

I should have anticipated this, as Forche is a poet of witness, but I didn't expect how strongly Blue Hour, especially its long abecedarian poem "On Earth," would connect to the other book I am currently reading, What is the What, by Dave Eggers, a novel based on the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. He and other orphans walked from Southern Sudan to Ethiopa, hoping for aid and relief, witnessing terrible things, including the murder of parents, siblings, and friends, beatings, death from hunger and fatigue. Some of Forche's lines stuck out as something one of these boys might see: "in this camp, so many refugees" or "the little notebook of poems in the pocket of a corpse." "On Earth" has beautiful things in it, but also terrible things, a litany of everything that can and does occur. This couplet in it even matches the novel's title in a way:

     the what is? gives the wrong answer
     the what is? has ruined thought

as does the litany of "what" in the W section of the poem. And the ending, of the poem, since the beginning of the novel recounts a robbery:

     your things have been taken
     your things have been taken away

The Blue Flower

In the middle of the night, I finished TheBlue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald, making good use of a couple of sleepless hours. In the book, the character of Fritz (who will grow up to be Novalis) has begun a story in which a listener is enraptured by a stranger’s story of a blue flower. There is also treasure, in the form of conventional riches, but the narrator longs to see the blue flower and Fritz, the writer, asks, “What is the meaning of the blue flower?”

Stop now, if you don’t want to hear another character’s answer to the question. But usually a symbol in literature can mean many related things; a symbol has great complexity, interpretations that ripple out like circles on a pond. (Wikipedia kindly ripples out the meaning of the blue flower from German Romanticism to the present day.) I’m still pondering the blue flower of the novel and won’t name all the ripples I see, but I do plan to quote “the Bernhard,” one of the children in Fritz’s family, a blond boy also called the angel in the house, who loves water—the river—and is relentlessly curious.

            He had been struck—before he crammed the story back into Fritz’s book-bag—by one thing in particular: the stranger who had spoken at the dinner table about the Blue Flower had been understood by one person and one only. This person must have been singled out as distinct from all the rest of his family. It was a matter of recognising your own fate and greeting it as familiar when it came.

This is what rippled inside me, the “matter of recognising your own fate and greeting it as familiar when it came.” (Spellcheck has automatically recognized and provided the familiar American spelling of Fitzgerald’s “recognising” as I compose….and I have obstinately changed it back in three cases.)

Still awake, the new issue of The Sun at hand, I read the interview with Stephen Harrod Buhner on plant intelligence and natural healing. You should know that Sophie, the betrothed in The Blue Flower, is seriously ill. When Fritz first sees her, age 12, across the room, he is inexplicably drawn to her. Says Buhner, “The ancient Athenians had a word for that moment when some intangible part of ourselves leaves our bodies and touches a living intelligence in the world: aisthēsis. There is an exchange of soul essence accompanied by a gasp of recognition, a deep breath, an inspiration.” As Fritz recognized Sophie, I recognized the Bernhard, with a little gasp at his inspiration.

And finally, for now, as I’m sure I’ll keep rippling in the blog, yesterday’s mail brought the current issue of Quiddity, in which I have a very short poem called “Broken Clouds.” You can hear it here, and it has blue in it. The magazine defines itself up front:

quiddity—the real nature or essence of a thing; that which makes it what it is (OED)

Blue Morpho

A rainy Blue Monday in the blog. Time to catch up on house-cleaning and record-keeping. There's a little less dust in my office, a few more books off the floor and onto the shelves, and a bit less scatter in my brain. But some! It's always good to have some scatter brain. I have a hat* that says "Scatter Joy" (Emerson) and I wear it over my brain to remind me. I do need to clear my head for the next writing project. A museum project looms, and the cemetery walk is coming, but this was a hunker down at home catch-up day for sure.

This Blue Morpho Butterfly is by Martin Johnson Heade.

Blue was always my favorite color in childhood. This kind of light blue, pure blue. Then I loved green, bright green, grass green. And then yellow, sunlit yellow, daffodil yellow, lemon yellow, for it was the color of joy. I'm coming back to blue these days, and back to my childhood self. Hmm.

This blue chysalis, for a Monarch butterfly, is by Lorel Ski.**

*Thanks, Tim! **Thanks, Lorel Ski!

Spool of Blue

It's a Blue Monday (on a "throw-back Thursday") as I just finished re-reading, by way of hearing, A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler. I read the hard copy back when it was brand new and a 7-day book at the library. Now my book group is reading it, I am the host (in early February), and I knew it would be wise to re-read it. The hard copies were out, so I tried it as an audiobook, read aloud by Kimberly Farr, a Broadway actress who, I see from her bio, "created the role of Eve in Arthur Miller's first and only musical, Up From Paradise, which was directed by the author." Neato!

I think she must have been in the University of Michigan staging of it in Ann Arbor, to have created the role, so to speak, because someone else plays Eve in the New York Times-reviewed version that has Len Cariou as God and Austin Pendleton as Adam. (It looks like it was a flop, as was The Creation of the World and Other Business, the non-musical version of Genesis by Arthur Miller, but I do remember that being a big hit in speech tournaments around that time!) Sigh... Making a living in the theatre is hard.

Anyhoo, back to the spool of blue thread. I was so glad I listened to the book, for now the image of the actual spool of blue thread, used for mending a dashiki shirt, is salient in my mind. So is a Swedish blue porch swing, and all the kinds of love and forgiveness we might witness or long for in the world. I love Anne Tyler. I remember how an excerpt from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant first wowed me. Oh, and that reminds me of fried chicken, made by more than one woman in more than one generation in A Spool of Blue Thread. But, most recently, in my mind (and ears), Nora. As the host, I might conceivably make fried chicken for my book group, but I think we will all be better off if I don't.

Now, stop reading to avoid a spoiler, but I am also going to try to avoid it by not telling you who did what and why.... Instead, I'll ask this blend of an interpretive question (as it applies specifically to a character and action in the book) and an evaluative question (as we might apply it in our lives): When is it (or is it ever) a good idea to "pretend not to see" the deep emotion of one of our fellow passengers in life? And why, or why not? If and when you have read the book, you will know why I am asking, and you can answer for this character as well as yourself!

Caliban as a Fiddler Crab, Moral Beauty

Day 137 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project, and today is a hodge-podge, potlatch, tie-up-the-loose-ends-of-random-coincidii-collage entry that I thought of entitling “Caliban as a Fiddler Crab, Moral Beauty, and a Boob Job,” but it would have made an awkward, unwieldy header and might have attracted unwelcome email messages.

Recently I blogged on Oscar Wilde who mentioned Caliban in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Walter Pater, who spoke of moral beauty in a preface to Dorian Gray. Suddenly last night I got to see Caliban under the stars in The Tempest at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival!

Babbitt’s Books staff were invited to opening night, as we created a bookcase of Shakespeare books for their gift shop, and we offer a discount to actors, crew, and staff who visit the store! I saw one of our customers, who had just been in, and who said he, too, had just suddenly been invited, and wished he’d had a chance to read it first. “You can read it now,” I suggested, “and have this production fresh in your mind!” We both loved the circle of blue sky with clouds on the floor, on the back of the set, and on Ariel’s back, that blue-bodied spirit!

Each time I see a production of Shakespeare, I love to see what will come through most vividly to help me understand a particular element of the play I’ve not understood with my whole body and soul before, even if I “understood” it intellectually or had it explained to me in a class or by a critic. That is, what does the particular production make available to me and to everybody else in the audience, whether or not we all respond to it, or interpret it exactly the same way?

I’ve mentioned the blue sky with clouds aspect of the set (which corresponded to the actual weather yesterday: blue sky, puffy white clouds, transforming gradually into gorgeous clear night, nearly full moon, scatter of stars and lightning bugs) and I’d like to mention that two stairways moved from brown below to blue above as they approached the actor balcony and the ethereal realm. But there was also that circle of sky mirrored on the floor!

Caliban—half human, half monster—was marvelous, blotched, and fishy, with a golden fiddler crab-like claw on one hand. He touched me deeply when he spoke to the human visitors about the music of the spheres, the celestial music of the spirits—Ariel and his blue band—that he hears all around him as a matter of course, and which stuns and frightens and delights the humans hearing it for the first time. This Caliban also moved me in his pleas to Prospero. “I loved you,” recounting the early attentiveness Prospero gave him. Then, human monster that he was, Caliban lusted after Miranda, or that is Prospero’s excuse, anyway, for the withdrawal of love from Caliban…gave me pause!

I was moved, too, by Ariel, in service to the magical Prospero, enslaved, enthralled…. Ariel does everything he is asked, in return for his freedom. (I am reminded of the blue genie in Disney’s Aladdin.) And Ariel teaches Prospero a deeper compassion. Ariel would feel something for these dreadful suffering humans “if I were human,” he says! Gives Prospero pause, and helps him access his own empathy and forgiveness.

Then, deeply touching, Ariel is free. The actor’s body takes in the reality of that, the loss of Prospero as master, friend, and companion on the island, and then, deeply satisfied, runs off, free! There is no sentimental, out-of-character hugging. He’s just gone!

And Prospero, now truly humbled, even wiser than before, with only his human powers, asks for our hands in the traditional epilogue. And we applaud.

So what came through for me this time was that compassion and forgiveness are sweeter than revenge, that we ought to love our monstrous flawed selves, that we ought to behave responsibly and with love (both Caliban and Prospero learn this lesson!), and that our human selves are enough on this earth. We can let our spirits run free.

So, some coincidii:

The Babbitt’s bookcase in the ISF gift shop now displays my first poetry chapbook, Selected Roles (Moon Journal Press, 2006), which contains poems in the voices of several Shakespearean characters, including Miranda! I was in the Illinois Shakespeare Festival way back in 1981! (Selected Roles is also on the local authors shelf, and online, at Babbitt’s—always only $5!)

Caliban as a fiddler crab reminds me of Fiddler Crab Review, a marvelous online blogazine dedicated to reviewing chapbooks, old and new!

I have a chapbook by Susan Slaviero, who tells you what she is reading frequently in her blog, Mythology and Milk.

Likewise, Sarah Sloat in the rain in my purse. People keep telling me they loved what she said in the little interview I posted here, to time with a review of her chapbook, In the Voice of a Minor Saint (Tilt Press, 2009), at Prick of the Spindle, and they want more interviews with poets! So I will try to accommodate.

On that, I am thinking I might review/interview here in the blog if you to send me your poetry book or chapbook c/o Babbitt’s, so let me check with my boss about that. I would like to receive the book at the bookstore, have the option of reviewing it here or at the bookstore blog, and also have the option of keeping it, passing it on to a poet friend, or selling it gently used at the bookstore so a poet who can’t afford it new can afford it used, so it gets another reader, and so the boss can receive a bit of economic return for housing it, and for listing it online at the store database. Your thoughts on this?

Likewise, that would carry on the spirit and tradition of my reviews at RHINO, and I am waiting to hear whether they want me to do something similar again for them!

And what about the boob job? OK, I am now reading The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson, having finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in time to see it tonight at the local theatre, and somebody gets a boob job. Why?! There is a reason, but I am dubious about it, and don’t want to be a spoiler, etc., but it is making me think hard about how much of the trilogy is truly devoted to feminism, and how much is sex-sells-and-makes-for-a-blockbuster-movie-version. So I send you to Seana’s blog entry on another book, using the Steig Larsson phenomenon as a contrast. Much to ponder!

And, finally, one of our Babbitt’s customers yesterday was the woman who ran the spotlight for The Tempest last night! And Julie Kistler was in the opening-night audience, too, to review the production for her blog, A Follow Spot! (Don't know if her review is up yet, but it will be, and there's plenty of fun stuff to read in her blog!)

Blue Blood Moon

I have been observing the moon this week and will gaze up again tonight, but did not go out in the early morning today to try to glimpse the super blue blood moon in its full (but locally cloud covered) glory. I did, however, imagine a blue blood moon for this poem, "Blue Blood Moon," published in Stirring in December of 2011. The last super blue blood moon was November 30/December 1, 1982, and I probably noticed it but without all the hype way back then. The poem's blue blood moon is milder, not super, and apparently connected to the speaker's mood. So that's a random coincidence for a Random Coinciday in the blog.

Here's another one:

Nancy Heather Brown, a retired public television producer who now writes for Escape Into Life, wrote about women's rights and the state of the union as she sees it, among many other related things, for instance, "[p]atriarchy at is worst," in this piece, "Life in the Box: Venus Marches On." Summing up the 20th-century book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, she said:

One of my main take-aways from that book is that men tend toward hierarchical relationships—where people are one-up or one-down from each other. And women tend to believe everyone’s equal.

My other reading this week included various articles and stories in old New Yorker magazines that now need to be recycled. I was taken by a piece on the artist Laura Owens, who, the New Yorker writer Peter Schjeldahl tells has had "a keen interest in whatever her peers were up to, eschewing competitiveness." That makes sense to me, and I take a keen interest in what my poet peers are up to, and my fellow theatre artists, because mutual support is important to me, and we can inspire and motivate each other without needing to be rivals. Imagine my delight to see Laura Owens quoted as saying, "It's debilitating to think that this person is above me and this person is below me. I want to be in a conversation with someone." And it would be a conversation of equals, evidently, and Owens seems to be a Venus, and Nancy Heather Brown might also enjoy this Random Coinciday in the blog.

Little Girl Blue

Well, it's back to school and back to work for some of us who just finished up Spring Break around here, making it a Blue Monday for some. And, alas, back to snow shoveling for others, making it a shivery blue.

So my imaginary playlist for today is all Ella Fitzgerald, from The Rodgers and Hart Songbook, Volume 1:

"Spring is Here"
"Little Girl Blue"
"The Blue Room"

But I'm having some fun writing people's names on little slips of blue paper, folding them up, and dropping them in a recyclable green plastic cherry tomato basket in the Big Poetry Giveaway!  If you want to play, comment on that post or any post in April, and I'll put you in the basket, too!

Yesterday, on Poetry Someday, my workshop rehearsed for The Architecture of Spring, a poetry reading coming up this Tuesday night, March 29, 7:30-8:30 p.m., at the McLean County Museum of History, 200 N. Main, Bloomington, Illinois.  It's free!

We've written poems in response to architecture and, in particular, to the current exhibit, A Passion for Detail: The Architectural Legacy of A. L. Pillsbury.  A contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright, Pillsbury designed many homes, schools, and public buildings all over Illinois.

Off now to sing along with Ella!

Blue Bugleweed

The blue bugleweed is blooming. It is a ground cover in some gardens, grows tall in others, and is invasive in some places. Oh, how I love Wikipedia as a source of info and pictures, here offered by H. Zell. (Thank you, H. Zell!) The blue bugleweed in my garden is "chocolate chip" and comes from a farmer's market a couple summers ago.

It's Blue Monday in the blog, and I send you here for the soundtrack (and blue jello)! I'm not blue, as my daughter is home for the weekend, and till her mid-week final exams, and then for good, as she's transferring back to college in our town! Yesterday we spent some time Spring Cleaning for her summery return! She got a job at The Vidette, as a reporter who takes her own pictures, which is the way journalism is going. Maybe she can teach me how to take my own pictures, on my smart phone that is smarter than me. (For now, thanks again, H. Zell!)

I've been pondering again how I like to get up close and personal with the various wildflowers and perennials in my own back yard. It's a way of life, and I've chosen it.

Hard Damage

This one had poem after poem of gripping intensity and experience unlike my own, so I read it as if looking into a new world. Hard Damage by Aria Aber, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Whiting Award (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). But it is my world--America with its covert actions elsewhere in the world (once her parents' homeland) and full of privilege (of which she and I both partake). And it isn't my world: it is refugee camp, Afghanistan left behind, and languages I don't know but deeply appreciate, as explored in these poems.

Cover image: Moa, 1911, Leopold Museum, Vienna.

Here in Hard Damage I find grenades compared to turtles and also "grenade" connected to pomegranate in etymology:

                        Grenade, its shape
     so much like the fruit they named it after,
     pomegranate, from Latin pomum granatum
     (apple with many seeds), something
     I can harvest and pick from a tree--
     a comfortable taste in my mouth, and yes,
     fruit of the dead, or of fertility, depending
     on whose sustenance to listen to.

I find connections, of course, to the other books I've been reading here in August for the Sealey Challenge--for instance, a mention of the month of August itself, in the poem "Foreign Policies," one that moves from and shifts back to the more personal poems in the book to the more political: "August, too, was a mastermind, distracting me / toward your lima bean eyes."

And the color blue: "the blue uncertainty" of "Asylum" in a refugee camp, and "Rilke, blue prince of the lyric I, comes to me often." In "Operation Cyclone," a father, "his voice is blue shards of a dinner plate / atop a compost heap." In another part of that same long poem, a brother-uncle-son, lost, imagined in the section called "Interrogation Chamber": "The blue light censoring his face." And the sentiment that might somehow save us all: "If, despite relentless blue, despite snow, you dared to hold me / and I dared to be held"

Connections to Here, by C.S. Giscombe, in a way, to the idea of "here," as in Aber's poem titled "Here," "We sip Arabic coffee and warm our faces / by the oven, which glares at us with its black snout." (Also, a poem that contains this fabulous simile: "ice / falling from fir trees like books pushed off a shelf.") And in the poem "Alles/All," how "there" compares and contrasts to "here," creating two kinds of place:

"From the back, in my car seat, I'd protest: No, AFGHANISTAN IS MORE BEAUTIFUL. IT HAS EVERYTHING THERE.

You'd laugh, somewhat confounded: You have never been there.

There: green macaws, AK 47s, feces in water pipies, schools in clay huts, tiny crocheted shoes, market men sitting on upside down crates, landmines, mud, an abundance of apples, pomegranates, watermelon, flies, mosquitoes, that little house behind the river--does it still exist?

Here: You and I in a car, green fields of cattails, the summer night warblers gossiping, the sky lowering its clouds like marbled ham toward us.

There: I love you, I love you.

Here: All that there is."

I find it remarkable that this poet so deeply remembers a world she can't really remember--too young, gone too long--through her relatives' memories, stories, and her own research. And creates it here so well! She loves and honors her mother, who spent time in prison for revolutionary action. In "Lass/Let," one of the poems that examines meaning via a single word in German and in English, we learn:

"My mother let me happen to her. She let prison happen to her, simply because she believed in Women's Rights and Afghanistan as a sovereign state. She went to prison with her little sister, and she emerged." The story continues in the poem "dir/You": "You, I said to my mother, have been to prison. But she cooked on in the kitchen, ignoring me. Or, she scratched and peeled the wallpaper, weeping...."

It's a beautiful book, with terrible things happening in it:

"the woman, 34, revolutionary socialist, killed by the mujahedeen, was found with her head in her lap: wearing an earring, red lipstick, a book of poems in her jacket"

Because it is a beautiful world, with terrible things happening in it.

Monday, Monday

There's been a request that I share my poetry prompts for April, National Poetry Month, so I will try to do that from now on at the end of each blog entry in April (today including the earlier prompts), but I urge all you poets out there to Google around till you find just the right poetry site for you.

Some of the prompting sites are in the blogroll here on the right.

Today's prompt from me is the phrase "back-to-work" because it is Monday, Monday. Plus, it is Blue Monday in the blog. Yesterday the college boy went back to school, after a pleasant long weekend at home, picked up by his friends in a blue car.

This Mama and Papa had been hanging out with our "boy" outdoors in the wonderfully windy 82-degree day, on the patio, at picnic table and on rusty glider, talking about nothing and everything, as life rolled by.

Speaking of blue, I continue to admire Gina Berriault's stories in Women in Their Beds. A lot of them of are blue. A lot have a slice-of-life quality, showing us the blue moment and/or the tender, aching moment of love or grief or regret, and doing nothing artificial to resolve it, erase it, or appease the gods.

I love the coincidence that some of her stories are about actresses, artists, or novelists, and about the dilemmas of balancing life and art, or what is reasonable to reveal in art, or why it might not be reasonable to reveal (or distort) it.

That reasoning goes on in the reader's head (my pretty blue head), not necessarily the story.

*****

So, prompts for April poem-a-day:

April 1--personal folly
April 2--slatternly tendencies
April 3--group dreaming (Google Inception or Jung)

April 4--back-to-work

Hopelessly Blue

Today, driving to pick up my daughter at school, I heard the most beautiful song, a woman saying, "I keep looking for a place to fit / Where I can speak my mind / I've been trying hard to find the people / I won't leave behind," in a slow, yes, melancholy voice. I felt addressed! I felt connected to her. "This could be my song!" I was thinking.

I kept listening and driving in the beautiful, blue sky day, figuring Jon Norton of WGLT Jazz would eventually repeat the song title and tell me who was singing it. But then all sound stopped, and some alarming noises came out of the radio, and, worse than technical problems, it was an Amber Alert! Two babies kidnapped by their "non-custodial mother."  That could make anyone hopelessly blue.

Hoping these kids will be safe & loved.

What I was hearing, without knowing, was a really famous Beach Boys song, by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, called "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," but it was sung by Kat Edmonson, so that's why I was so strongly identifying. Her pacing, her mellow melancholy.The lyrics come out a certain way from her, making it quite different from the Beach Boys rendition.

It's from her new album, Way Down Low, which also has a song called "Hopelessly Blue" on it.

Meanwhile, my spiderwort is blooming, gloriously blue. And the red grape spiderwort is gearing up to bloom, too.

Red, White, & Blue Monday

Happy Memorial Day to all, or sad, as the case may be. If you are visiting grave sites, honoring your lost loved ones, I send you comforts. If you are celebrating with picnics, I join you in joy, having been gathering with family wamily here this weekend. A little blue on this Red, White, & Blue Monday in the blog as family members head home...or away....

Last night we said goodbye to our newly-graduated son as he headed back to "real life" in Chicago, which involves finding a job, an internship, and/or an apartment in the next couple of months. The train was late, and when it finally came, it wasn't actually his train! It was the earlier delayed train! So we took him home for cookies and milk and took him back for the real farewell. What a beautiful, warm, breezy night!

The train delay was good in that husband could get home from club volleyball tournament--his girls won the whole thing!--in time to say goodbye.

Thanks to Wikipedia-Wikimedia for the Memorial Day at Arlington Cemetery public domain image, and to Jean-Pol Grandmont for the red grape spiderwort, which is what greets me in the morning in my garden. That and blue and lavender blue Ohio and Virginia spiderwort...which is also Illinois spiderwort!

Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour

From the title, you can tell this might be a dark, hilarious book. And it is. It's really dark, so dark it sometimes swallows up the hilarity, and all the horror of world politics shines through. A paradox, that shining. Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour, by Conor Bracken, is another of the wonderful Bull City Press books, this one from 2017, but, since it's about the polarizing figure of Henry Kissinger, seems to fit the general polarization of now. 

The cover art, Overflow, by Jenny Blazing (2017, acrylic, collage), looks like a city turning into a waterfall--so it brings to mind The Niagara River, by Kay Ryan, and its cover--but it might be a dam, its mechanisms overcome...which, yes, also describes the book--how loving the machinations of a world maker/breaker transforms things or sort of obscures and reveals what's really going on...

I was delighted to find the poems "jogging through August," like me, on p. 13, in "Henry Has Me Tell Him About My First Time," which is a pretty icky and not very delightful account of unwanted attentions, in a swamp. As you can imagine.

Another coincidence was the color blue again, in the amazing "Henry Pats His Heart for Emphasis," in the line, "I hold his x-rays to the moon's blue light." The poem keeps trying to figure out if Henry has a heart:

     If it mutters to itself at night upset
     by coups planned late, worrying that it left
     the serial numbers on the submachine guns.

You get the idea! And the dark hilarity! And the speaker is quite up front about his/her/their (?) complicity, as in "How American":

     Henry and I, we're as American
     as an overdose of opiates,

     our bodies red and white and blue
     and bloated. American as rural poverty
 
     and tort law, fingers lopped off by gears
     that move fast as the cruise missile in his living room

     we take turns straddling like a mustang,
     whispering hoarsely "ashes to ashes,

     lust to lust."

Dark, right? And I love the pun in "hoarsely." And it's amazing how the poems really are love poems, as in the last stanza of the poem "Henry Talks About the Hyenas," an unlikely title for such a lovely turn at the end, when, Henry having chosen the descriptor "velvety" for the night, this happens:

     The night a curtain
     we can roughen with one hand
     and smooth with the other.

Which also describes the manipulation of world politics, eh?

More (scary) blue in "Call Me Condor": "before dragging me from the air's blue throat." More marvelous (scary) imagery: "the sun still zipping the river / up in a yellow body bag." The continued mix of love and horror--in "How Mercy Works" (by blame and cruelty)--and in the wordplay of the title, "The Hands With Which Henry Puts The Casual Back in Casualty." But you know it's going to be this way from the very first poem, with its funny title, "The Tao of Henry," and that short poem's last two lines:

     Keep your boot on the throat of the season.
     With your good eye dare the horizon to shrug.

Green Monday

Happy St. Patrick's Day! That makes a Green Monday of this Blue Monday in the blog. I am enjoying the last few minutes of the blue sky, as well as being back on the Internet! Thank you, Frontier, for the new modem. Why did we not realize this sooner? Oh, well, glad to be back and up to speed.

I'm always a little blue after the kids visit, because then they go away again...  Daughter is done with her spring break; son has gone back to Chicago after a visit. Even my sister and her daughter were in town this weekend! But now it's blue/green Monday all over the place.

Over at Escape Into Life, Scott Klavan has taken a look at the one-person show in general and Satchmo at the Waldorf in particular. The accompanying art by Jim Naughten also looks at the black man uncomfortable in the white man's "costume." Much to ponder here.

And I saw a giant leprechaun and many people wearing green on Saturday, coming back into town from the state volleyball tournament just in time for the St. Patrick's Day parade.

Blue + yellow = green

Blue Penumbra

It's a Blue Monday in the blog, though actually gray, without the promised and needed rain. I've got a poem called "Blue Penumbra" in the new issue of Blue Fifth Review, which has a fantastic cover photo of a highway yearning toward a glorious blue sky. It's a great issue, and the prose poem "And," by Carol Reid, really got to me as I'd just heard an interview on NPR about the status of AIDS treatment and because medical marijuana (hey, hey, like the MONKEES) might be coming to our town...

I've just finished reading The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green (fellow Kenyon College alum!), for book group. It's my daughter's book, a Christmas present from Grandma, and she read it right before me, wanting to read the book before seeing the movie. We both like the humor in it, and my daughter is annoyed that the movie apparently leaves out some of the tough and annoying reality about cancer treatment that the book leaves in. (But I do see the oxygen tank cannula in the movie poster, so that's a good sign.) I also, of course, heard a good interview with John Green on NPR! And I sort of want these shoes.

Since every day is a Random Coinciday, I must note the reference to language difference and, specifically, the Dutch, in this book, on p. 209, where the narrator tells us the Dutch call lattes "wrong coffee" because they have "more milk than coffee." In The Language Archive, the play I'm directing, the Dutch are pertinent, as are different ways of saying things. But now I can't help but hear Michael Caine, as Nigel Powers in Goldmember (an Austin Powers film), saying, "There are only two things I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures...and the Dutch."

Darker This Morning

I'm cured of the crud but a little hoarse still, from screaming at volleyball and with a bit of lingering chest cough. We play for the state championship Tuesday evening. Wish us luck! My husband is the coach of a marvelous team of 7th graders, who are nice human beings, very supportive of each other and of their 6th grade practice squad, as well as talented athletes.

He is such a good coach. The girls and their parents appreciate and admire him, and he brings out the best in them. In the second game of the first match, he started several "bench players," girls who have been improving all season in practice, and were ready now to perform, and they did. This was an appropriate risk to take against this particular team, and our girls won the match in two games. In the next match, which went all three games, the regular season starters went back in, rested and fed, and played at the top of their abilities against a well-matched challenger. Tight fight all the way through! Screaming final point on a spike. Yay!

This morning it was darker driving my daughter to school, but spring is coming, more light, and it's already 55 out there and due to be in the 70s all week, we hear. I was driving straight into dark blue beauty, clouds opening, somehow perfect Blue Monday weather.

I am a little blue, sort of that post-sickness lingering faint fatigue and post-thrill sighing release. I've drafted some new poems and have more work to do. It's good work. I'm grateful for it.

Somehow the sky resembled these blue roses.