Dr. Sward's Cure for Melancholia

Writers Friendship, David Alpaugh cheers the soul

2010-09-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

My friend David Alpaugh, author of “Counterpoint,” “Heavy Lifting,” and widely read and discussed essays on "The Professionalization of Poetry" and "New Math of Poetry," responds to my new poem, “Legacy: Muse Neglect,” which opens

We’re comin’ up to my birthday./I’m seventy-seven—twenty-three more and I’ll be a hundred!/So what’s it all about, sixty-odd years of writing, scribbling?/Etc.

Hello, Robert:

My apology for taking so long getting back to you on "Legacy: Muse Neglect." Been tidal-waved by late days of summer, gearing up for fall obligations (Coolbrith, Valona, etc.).

"Legacy" is a brave poem. You certainly touch a responsive chord in this poet, as I, too, am starting to wonder if I've lost the muse, have been treading water post-Counterpoint. Didn't old man Wordsworth and young man Byron have similar doubts? ("Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?").

I love the concrete "eye to eye" confrontation with your "first mutt," that "first published poem." The metaphorical sense here is as sure as it is quiet. The paradoxical reversal of the dog becoming master and wagging the man is richly comic, and most poignant in that manly dogly reproach, "Bad poet, bad poet!" Unpretentiousness that comes from truly having the goods rather than just the flash has always been one of your most appealing qualities.

Cheer up, Bob. "Legacy" is proof that you're poems have not lost their canine magic. Dogliness was and is the metaphor for what you continue to aim for in your work. Falling a bit short much of the time is inevitable. (When Samuel Beckett was asked if he had a favorite work he shook his head and muttered: "Something wrong with all of them.")

The more I look at the history of poetry the more I believe that our mission is (in Frost's words) "to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of." You've done that with "Uncle Dog," "God is in the Cracks," "Heavenly Sex" and a dozen others, and now "Legacy" will be in the running (or, as you would say, trotting!).

The only question is the crucial one for our Po-Busy time: will the gatekeepers get out of the way and allow poetry to live not by status and accreditation but by love? Here, I'm afraid that "the worst are full of passionate intensity." Let's hope we can overshoot their papier-mâché palace and land a few good poems on the other side!

With deep respect for your generous, generative humor,

David

Podiatrist Father, "God is in the Cracks," Black Moss Press

2010-06-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

In answer to a recent query from 'Podiatrist Melbourne' ( see below)

"Podiatrist Melbourne has left a new comment on your post "Podiatrist Father":

Interesting blog. It would be great if you can provide more details about it. Thanks you..."

I'd say 1) my poem "The Podiatrist's Son," which opens God is in the Cracks (Black Moss Press, Canada) is the best introduction to that blog and the directions in which it flows. The Globe & Mail (Canada) noted in a review, "The heart and core of this book is a series of dramatic monologues and dialogues between father and son..."

2) In addition to being a podiatrist, Dad evolved his own blend of kabbalistic, Christian hermetic, and prescient New Age mysticism which lent its colors to his medical practice... (quoting here from the Globe and Mail review). Podiatry is the take-off point...

Red Room Writers.com

2010-06-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks for checking in... for latest, please visit:

http://www.redroom.com/author/robert-sward

and, also,

http://writerfriendships.webdelsol.com

Working simultaneously on 3 blogs (how did that happen?), I'm focusing more now on the Red Room Writers.com and, in addition, "Writers' Friendship / Writers' Enmity." Introduction to Writers' Friendship follows:

"Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride,
emulation, avarice, malice, all the odious qualities which drive a man
to compete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has
made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in
doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though
he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of
artistic achievement." So says novelist Evelyn Waugh.

If Waugh is right, then what is it like for one writer driven by
pride, emulation, avarice and malice, to sustain a friendship with
another?

Anyway, for more, click on http://writerfriendships.webdelsol.com

Casting and Gathering - Friendship, On the Contrary...

2009-11-29T17:20:00.000-08:00

_____________

by Andrew Boobier

--
In his poem, Casting and Gathering, dedicated to his friend Ted Hughes,
Seamus Heaney writes:

I love hushed air. I trust contrariness.
Years and years go past and I do not move
For I see that when one man casts, the other gathers
And then vice versa, without changing sides.

Heaney evokes here the push-pull effect of friendship, the fact that
two people can have different natures, contrary impulses yet be united
in the common bond of mutuality and respect for each other as fishermen
and poets. The poem is also about growing up and learning to respect
these differences, 'I have grown older and can see them both...' he
says.

There is a dialectical movement in which the two opposing forces of
Heaney's and Hughes' language (the 'hush' and 'lush') are not only
synthesised into their bonds of friendship but also as a resolution
within the poem and Heaney's own contrary. The strong resolutions
within Heaney's poetic output in general are indicative of his
allegiance to his Romantic forbears and his own particular need for
balance and redress (e.g. see his lecture, The Redress of Poetry -
essentially a post-romantic rebuttal of post-modernism).

I have a great [*word missing?] of sympathy with Heaney's trust of
contrariness, though I have a harder time coming up with cosy
resolutions. I once wrote a poem combining
suicidal American poets with the need for public displays of mourning
after national tragedy, it ended:

Human beings,
as Eliot says, cannot bear too much
reality.
History is a register of fancy.
War is a matter of personal
taste. Poetry is the language
of saints.
If only everything
were so black and white.

That last line is an ironic, wistful sigh mimicking the
romantic-capitalist desire to categorise discourse and ideology into
neat manageable parts which can be subsumed or appropriated into a neat
manageable whole. I certainly do not blame people for seeking these
kinds of resolutions; we're all looking for something to hold on to
when reality gets too heavy [*to] bear. But having been schooled these
last twenty years in existentialism, surrealism, and the works of
Georges Bataille, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, I tend to have
a more sceptical eye on such matters.

I, too, trust contrariness. But it is one that is intuitive, left open
to its own raw and rough edges, dark and often unresolved. This kind of
operation is not always easy to undertake when you have also been
influenced by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Heaney,
Hughes, and others who have trod the well-worn path of Romantic
academic poetry fed to the young on undergraduate courses. Like
Whitman, I say: Do I contradict myself? Well, then, I contradict
myself. This attitude is undoubtedly rooted in the fact
that I am a working class kid educated to highfalutin middle class
intellectual values.

So, on the one hand I am a poet - the ne plus ultra of post-romantic
narcissistic navel-gazing. On the other, I hate that kind of widely
accepted and highly-acceptable form of egocentricism. Poor Andrew, torn
between the ego-impulse to express himself and desire to lose the
'self' in a more communal project!

Anyway, a few years ago this came to a head. I've always been too
much of a misanthrope to be enthused by 'community arts' and so instead
I was drawn into the more cerebral collective adventure of surrealism.

One day I was browsing through one of the larger chain-store bookshops
when I came across a strange 'calling card' which had been left in a
book of surrealist short stories. I can't recall what it said exactly
but it intrigued me enough to contact the authors. I thought it was a
flyer for a magazine and I had just starting writing 'surreal' poetry
and so I sent them a letter with a couple of poems and told them I was
familiar with surrealist history and had even translated a novel by
Georges Bataille at university. They wrote back immediately and set up
a meeting in a nearby pub. So I then met up with four people calling
themselves The Leeds Surrealist Group. They were four friends who'd
originally met at university, united by a passion for black attire and
exploring the darker side of the imagination first begun in the 1920's
by Breton and his band of collective adventurers.

For some time the Leeds Group had been adhering to strict Bretonian
principles: collectively drawing[s] and writing, and devising games in
the single-minded pursuit to wrench the imagination back from the
all-devouring profit-motive and market forces. It was all very
idealistic, historically informed and seemingly exactly what I was
looking for. Inevitably we hit it off and I passed the 'interview' - my
wife and I were invited to one of their creative evenings. In the
candlelight and semi-gothic darkness we'd sit drinking red wine
discussing the politics of surrealism, the activities of other groups
in Prague, Paris and Stockholm, the mutual respect for Artaud and the
equally mutual hatred of 'Avida Dollars'. We'd play exquisite corps and
initiate new games. Once every week we'd sit in a pub, seething into
our beers with hatred for the 'system', all the while plotting a
'revolution of the mind' by collectively drawing on a beer mat.

The real glue that held everyone together was a deep, though often
fraught, friendship. Being newcomers, it took some time for the others
to let their guard down and let us into their inner sanctum of trust
and bonhomie. And yet, group dynamics being what they are, a certain
strained tension was never far away. There was a definite leader of the
group. He was the one who would organise sessions, the intellectual
force behind the whole project, be the overall spokesman etc. Coming
into the group from my own intellectual position (my 'Bataille' to his
'Breton') shifted the weight in the boat a little. Not that this would
come out in any overt way - we never argued - it was more subtle in the
way I would question given assumptions or undermine some of the
pomposity of what we did with humour. The group could be very serious,
sometimes to a point of blind self-righteousness. I find it difficult
to be totally serious about anything that doesn't appreciate the
absurdity of one's own human, all too human, situation.

There is no text without a context, and I wanted to understand more the
context of what made the group and its friendships tick. I therefore
devised a collective game called The Misfortunes of Memory which would
explore the limits of surrealistic discourse and what held us all
together. The game itself was quite complex, involving players choosing
objects from their past, writing them down and distributing them
secretly among the others where they would undergo various
'transformations' (visual representations, narrative reconstructions,
etc). One controlling individual called 'The Puppet Master' would have
little to do with the game except at the end when he would create a
small 4 act play based on material given by the others. The players
would then have to act out this play. The fifth act would be an act of
revenge whereby the actors view the puppet master's objects and devise
an ending to the play (including the Puppet Master's inevitable
'death') based on this new material.

The idea of the game would be for people to give up some aspect of
their past, like a gift (in more anthropological terms, an act of
'potlatch') and allow this to be manipulated and changed by others to
create something new. It would be an act of artistic trust and faith in
the Other. What it ultimately meant was that no act of self-reflection
would fall into a single 'fetishised' discursive form; it would be open
to a series of manipulations and interpretations outside any
individual's controlling ego. All-in-all I thought it quite an exciting
(and difficult) challenge and felt it would take the group's activity
to a new level.

My wife was equally enthusiastic about it though the rest of the group
were highly suspicious of my motives. They didn't seem to take in the
spirit it was presented: as a game. They wanted to analyse it and
discuss it further, reformulate it so it conformed to a mutually agreed
format with a more defined outcome. The fact that the game was
dictatorial was intentional; imposed by an Other like so much that goes
on in society. That's why I included the role of the Puppet Master
(i.e. the role of Authority) who has an unequal amount of power yet
gets his comeuppance. What I hoped the game would produce was a
microcosm of the power structures both within the group's own dynamics
and in society 'out there', as well as how collective engagement (i.e.
artistic friendship) could transform and corrupt power's own corruption
through the work of the imagination. It was everything we'd talked
about, enacted. OK, it might not work as a piece of art - it was the
taking part that was most important - lessons would be learned; the
armour (amour) of our friendship would have been tempered in the
white-hot forge of collective and imaginative engagement. Blimey, it
would have at least been a laugh!

It was not to be. I felt by this time the group had moved on and fallen
foul of the need to justify its existence through the production of
more bone fide 'works'.

Endless discussions, overt lack of enthusiasm, needless suspicion... it
was the beginning of the end, at least for us. And my wife and I began
to see less of the group.

In the end we re-enacted one of the more sordid episodes in the history
of surrealism - the ideological split. Breton vs Bataille all over
again.

You cannot blame the group or any individual for this outcome. It was
an experiment after all. It's just disappointing that we couldn't take
the risk and that, in the end, the ego's defences were set too strong
for this particular collective adventure.

People confuse my contrariness with being just plain awkward or
difficult. Perhaps I am. But being contrary, for me, means exploring
given assumptions about the world, seeing how far you can push things
before they fall off the edge or transform into something new. For me
it's nothing aggressive or nasty; it should be fun, playful. It's just
a tool of the imagination that many poets and artists employ. How far
should it go though? Should this imaginative prodding extend to the
bonds and boundaries of friendship too? As I found out there's a risk
involved. Is it worth taking? That depends. One man casts the other
gathers...

CODA
All this happened six or seven years ago now and I haven't heard from
the group since. Despite our differences, I still think about them and
wonder what they are up to. As for myself, I still live a contrary life
- relatively alone - between writing acceptably narcissistic poetry
(which has found a modicum of success) and devising more 'weird' stuff
with a new writer, Anton Brassiere (which has also had a slight drizzle
of public approval).

My wife and I have also resurrected the Misfortunes of Memory game
which we are currently playing: less as husband and wife but, more
comfortably, as friends. Where it's going, we're not sure yet, but we
are enjoying the ride!
----

BIO:
Andrew Boobier was born in Haworth, West Yorkshire in 1963.
He has published poetry and translations in the UK &
US. In 2003 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Andrew is also the editor of the Alsop Review's
prestigious online quarterly magazine, Octavo
(http://alsopreview.com/octavo). Andrew has just
launched his own web site at http://www.boobier.com;
He'd be pleased to hear from you.

Collin Kelley: Modern Confessional: Poets On Twitter

2009-07-27T19:21:00.000-07:00

Collin Kelley: Modern Confessional: Poets On Twitter

Writers' Friendship Renewed

2009-04-08T23:22:00.000-07:00

by Robert Sward

Barry Spacks, Poetry Matters

Reading an Old Friend's Poems
by Barry Sparks

The wonderings and sweetness of this voice
bring to my thought
the scent of fine paper, fine linen,
shirt with a white collar
for the first time worn,
long evening with a new book,
dwelling over the pages.

But in its sayings
of loss, this voice
tastes blood on its teeth, tart taste of blood
that can neither be spit out nor swallowed.
In reverence for loveliness
my friend's word-music comes upon me
like air before rain: remember? ?
that freshness, cool, ultimately delicate;
though air so offered
may lift at times into a wind
carrying sand, or into a deluge to follow.
"Where will we go," asks the poem's voice,
"when they send us away from here?" ?
the body gone
from all its familiar desirings
and gone this mind
that was a savoring,
while its voice alone continues,
a comfort to desire.
_________

BIO NOTE:

Barry Spacks earns his keep as a persistently visiting professor at UC Santa Barbara after years of teaching at M.I.T. He's published many poems in various journals, paper and pixel, plus stories, two novels, and seven poetry collections, the most extensive of which is SPACKS STREET: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, from Johns Hopkins. A CD of 42 poems, A PRIVATE READING, appeared in October 2000.

Always the Beautiful Answer - Prose Poem Primer

2008-09-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

Poet Peter Klappert's Circular Stairs, Distress in the Mirrors, Six Gallery Press,Pittsburgh, PA, 2008.
---

My friend Peter Klappert sends a copy of his new book plus Ruth Kempher's Always the Beautiful Answer: A Prose Poem Primer (the anthology was first published in 1999 and is now back in print). RK begins with a definition...

PROSE, n. 1. Speech or writing without metrical structure: distinguished from verse. 2. Commonplace or tedious discourse.

POEM, n. 1. A Composition in verse, characterized by the imaginative treatment of experience and a condensed use of language that is more vivid and intense than ordinary prose... any composition characterized by intensity and beauty of language or thought: a prose poem.

Age 19 serving in the U.S. Navy (LST 914) in the combat zone in Korea (c. 1952), I began writing... something... and reading everything I could find in the ship's library. In fact, I was ship's librarian... anyway Ruth Kempher includes Carl Sandburg's Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry, which I read then and haven't much looked at since. Now it all comes back... vividly, stuff that helped tease me into wanting to write. Sandburg's definitions of poetry include:

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

2. Poetry is an art practised with the terribly plastic material of human language.

3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

Anthology includes Charles Baudelaire's "The Stranger," "The Soup and the Clouds" and the editor's note, "The prose poem began as a conscious form in nineteenth century France, pioneered by Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire. The form represented a kind of reaction against the strict poetic dictates of the French Academy...

And Michael Hathaway's tribute / "Ode to Grandpa Hathaway," poet and editor I knew in the mid-1960s when I was teaching at Cornell and serving on Prof. William Hathaway's magazine, EPOCH. Michael Hathaway's poem meets / satisfies all 3 of Carl Sandburg's definitions.

Anyway, I send thanks to Peter Klappert, whose new book Circular Stairs, Distress in the Mirrors, I turn to next. Then to play his CD / Library of Congress Podcast,"The Poet and the Poem."

Wisdom through excess

2008-08-12T15:37:00.000-07:00

“It takes several lives to make one person.” I believe that and that we are also, all of us, phoenixes rising, or so it seems, from the ashes of our old selves. The rise and fall of the phoenix. Phoenix. Pheonix. Phoenix.

“The soul is a vast domain," wrote Arthur Schnitzler. "So many contradictions find room in us… We try our best to maintain order in ourselves, but this order is really just synthetic. Our natural condition is chaos.”

I think of that as I come across reviews of an earlier book. “Four Incarnations is named for four distinct periods in Sward’s writing career… shaped by four marriages and four dramatic changes…”

Friends ask, “Does it get easier… does getting divorced and getting divorced again… does it get easier, the second or third time around?”

NO.

In the 60s and 70s I took pride in being called a wild man, a crazy. Experimented and bought into the Romantic notion that to carouse, to indulge, to choose excess over order would help me as a writer. Excess. I'm thinking of Blake who suggested that the way to wisdom is through excess. I'm pro-Blake, but I'm re-thinking excess. These days I’m paying more attention to Ben Franklin and less to Blake. “Early to bed, early to rise...” In truth that's what works. That, for me at least, is what furthers the writing.

It's late in the game, but these are the confessions of a much-married man.

Why do you write?

2008-08-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize Lecture, 2006...

In his Nobel Lecture, Pamuk provides a fairly comprehensive reply to the question, "Why do you write?"

"Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can't do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey.

"I write because I love the smell of paper, pen and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten.. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but--as in a dream--can't quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."

The New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2006. Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely.

Men have breast tissue, too! Later... #2

2008-08-07T17:21:00.000-07:00

Medical Clinic

Procedure is for "US BREAST UNILAT... lump or mass in breast. Clinical data:

lump at 9 o'clock about 8 mm-1 cm size, cystic..."

"...at 9 o'clock"? Can't help thinking of World War II movies, gunnery specialists, air force pilots and sailors locating the enemy's position.

So there's the waiting, then these two procedures, imaging of where I'd have breasts if I had breasts. Thinking of re-reading Philip Roth's novel, "Breast." Maybe there'd be something there for me. A fan of his, but that's not a favorite book. I like Patriarchy, the one about his father, nonfiction, actually...

So awaiting the second procedure, another imaging, I pick up a copy of an old New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2006, and the page I open to is Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture titled "My Father's Suitcase," 2006. Usually I browse magazines before reading, but this time I plunge right in...

A good long wait so I'm able to read Pamuk's Lecture in its entirety. I'm a 75-year-old writer, Jesus Christ! And what's the point? You wanna read my poetry? Yes or no? Don't even think. Just say what comes to mind. Do I want to read my poetry? No, actually. True, I wanna read it out loud to an audience. That I enjoy. And I wanna write new stuff... but do I want to go back and read it off the page for pleasure? Hell, no.

Orhan Pamuk's Lecture is about himself and his father... and the suitcase full of writing his father left him. It's a meditation on the life of a writer. So here I am with my breast tissue and a whole bunch of questions, not the least of which has to do with mortality. It's the kind of thing that would stay in people's minds. "Oh, he's the man with the breasts." That they'd remember, the biographical detail. Okay, I'm no better than anyone else. That's probably what I'd remember too. Better than someone's poems. Most peoples' poems.

But Pamuk gets it right: "Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors--and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signs that dark and improvident times are upon us.

"But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is."

"Men have breast tissue, too."

2008-08-07T12:30:00.000-07:00

Mammogram - "Men have breast tissue, too."

August 7, 2008

"Men have breast tissue, too," said my doctor, a woman. And I got this little cyst or lump or something. So there I am today in Radiology, the only man in the waiting room. I don't know if the thing is benign or not, but the muzak they're playing is positively toxic. Hell, for me, would be an eternity of canned music. One tinny, one cloned musical cyst after another. Suspiciously benign music. Lumpy music made up of... I hate being here...

Women over 40 get these things, mammograms, every year, says the technician. Only one man in 500 gets breast cancer? Is that what she said? Or only one man in 500 gets to get a mammogram? Better my male breast tissue than my nuts. X-ray technican holds and squeezes my "whatever" into position so she can shoot the first of four x-rays. She sticks little "nipple dots" ("nipple markers") on the places where the little cyst(s) might be hanging out. I put my arm up, first the left arm, then (later) the right and lean into this contraption, we shift around, struggling, plump technician and I... together we try to produce enough of something to be squeezed into immobility and x-rayed. What the fuck! And I don't mind her squeezing me. It's an odd way to spend your morning. We do a little dance. She leads, I follow... it's all about getting my breast tissue into position. It's a struggle... we finally get it done.

Then the wait for... we need to find out if she needs to do it again, if the first set of x-rays don't work out. So I wait. Lying down. Sitting up. Dressing. Preparing to leave. Then simply waiting. Room has a pink orchid, possibly real. But stiff and unlife like. It wears a label: www.shopflower.com. And there's a can of Suave, "fights sweat... 24-hour protection."

And a copy of the Ladies Home Journal. What am I gonna do? My mother used to read this thing and I did too... years ago the Journal actually published some decent fiction. This issue offers "125 Beauty Boosters." It's for women. "Can This Marriage Be Saved? The Case of the Boring Husband." And, to round things out, "Sizzling Summer Cookouts!" plus, just what we all need, "Fatal Drug Side Effects (What Your Doctor Isn't Telling You.)"

Still waiting. One pink wall and three cream-colored walls and x-ray room itself is the size of a prison cell. Pink gowns...

X-ray machine has a name, the manufacturer? " Lorad - M-IV" it says on the glass (?) shield to protect technician as she shot those images. Yeah, how am I going to know where I am if I don't write these things down? catalog... it's a way of paying attention. A kind of writer's x-ray?

I read somewhere that men, aeons ago, were equipped to suckle their young. That's why we still got nipples.

Keepers - Garrison Keillor's Writers' Almanac

2008-07-26T12:22:00.000-07:00

In an emergency:

[Karl Menninger] often said that it would help anyone "to be getting three square meals a day and to know that there is opportunity ahead—things to be done, land to be turned, things to build." Once, when someone asked him what to do if a person feels he is about to have a nervous breakdown, Menninger replied, "Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for them."

* * *
This blog is something of a journal and one thing I do with my journals is use them, in part, as scrapbooks. What follows are some recent additions, excerpts from Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac:

It's the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, (books by this author) born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). His first important book was the collection of short stories In Our Time (1925), and he followed that with The Sun Also Rises (1926) and the book that most critics consider to be his greatest novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Hemingway said, "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."

* * *
It's the birthday of the man known as the "dean of American psychiatry," Karl Menninger, (books by this author) born in Topeka, Kansas (1893). His ideas about mental illnesses and how to treat them were revolutionary for his time—and many of the approaches he advocated and developed became instituted in modern psychiatric treatment centers.

Menninger built on some of the foundations that Freud had established, and some of his achievements rest in explaining Freud to the general population through magazine articles, books, and letters. But he also diverged in many ways from the founder of psychoanalysis. Where Freud believed in treating individuals through set therapy sessions, the Harvard-educated Menninger advocated a total immersion experience to help mentally ill individuals get well. He-co-founded with his father and brother, who were also medical doctors, the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. It was inspired partially by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, which Karl's father had visited many years prior and had come home to report, "I have been to the Mayos, and I have seen a great thing."

The Menninger Clinic started in a farmhouse with only 13 beds for patients. At first, local citizens sued to stop the opening of a "maniac ward" near them. The clinic expanded greatly and eventually grew to 39 buildings on 430 acres—and to a staff of 900 people.

In addition to disagreeing with Freud on the best approach to therapy, Menninger had differing notions as to what caused mental illness. While Freud attributed mental illness largely to conflicts within a person's mind, Menninger thought that societal influences played a large role in an individual's mental health. He believed strongly that mental sickness often came about because of a lack of parental love during childhood.

Also, he thought that criminal behavior was often a stage of mental sickness and that it should be treated accordingly. He was a lifelong advocate for prison reform, believing the current system did nothing to help stop antisocial behavior. He told Congress in 1971: "I sometimes feel as if I would like to scream out to the American public that they are squirting gasoline on the fire. The prison system is now manufacturing offenders, it is increasing the amount of transgression, it is multiplying crimes, it is compounding evil."

[Karl Menninger] often said that it would help anyone "to be getting three square meals a day and to know that there is opportunity ahead—things to be done, land to be turned, things to build." Once, when someone asked him what to do if a person feels he is about to have a nervous breakdown, Menninger replied, "Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for them."

He wrote more than a dozen books, including several best sellers. His works include The Human Mind (1930), Love Against Hate (1959), Man Against Himself (1956), Whatever Became of Sin? (1988), and The Crime of Punishment (1968).

* * *

Cormac McCarthy wrote in All the Pretty Horses: "They ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised."

Eucalyptus--California Fires Rage On

2008-07-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

Santa Cruz weekly "Good Times," runs cover story, "Eupocalypse Now, California FIRES rage on, so why are eucalyptus trees still the city's most protected menace?"

Ron Oliver, Fire Chief, is quoted as saying, "Eucalyptus are more dangerous because of the resins and oils, so they burn hotter than other trees. But in Santa Cruz they've been declared a heritage tree so we can't do much."

How do you define a "heritage tree"? Well, it "has a trunk with a circumference of 44 inches (approximately 14 inches in diameter or more), measured at 54 inches above existing grade..."

Why this arbitrary designation? Why this "circumference of 44 inches"? One of the city's arborists swears it's true: 44 inches was the waist size of the mayor of Santa Cruz at the time the heritage tree ordinance was written.

Fact: "Hummingbird nests are lost at a rate of 50 percent in eucalyptus, as opposed to 10 percent in native trees."

"Species diversity drops among the trees by about 70 percent, according to bird experts at Point Reyes Observatory."

For more, see the Good Times, July 24, 2008. GTWEEKLY.COM

Solid, well-researched article by Good Times News Editor, Chris J. Magyar, who quotes our neighbor David Zicarelli, "I have no sympathy for people who think of them as natural here. I've never met anyone who actually has these trees on their property who wants to save them. They're all people who look at them from afar. I like to call that sentimental environmentalism."

And, later in the story, a neighbor nods and remarks, 'After the atomic apocalypse, there will be nothing but cockroaches and eucalyptus."

Sonoma Book Festival, Sat., Sept. 20 - Santa Rosa

2008-07-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

P.O. Box 159
Santa Rosa, CA 95402
707.527.5412
www.socobookfest.org
email: info@socobookfest.org

NINTH ANNUAL SONOMA COUNTY BOOK FESTIVAL

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Cathy Balach
Electronic Art Available 707-527-5412
info@socobookfest.org

The ninth annual Sonoma County Book Festival is scheduled for Saturday, September 20, 2008, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in Old Courthouse Square in Santa Rosa. It is the oldest general interest book festival in Northern California.

The square will be transformed with the white canopies of more than 70 booths, showcasing writers, independent booksellers, publishers and other literary exhibitors. Over 60 authors from the Bay Area and across the country read from their published works and participate in discussion panels and workshops.

Admission is free and includes readings, panels, and activities for all ages. Among the broad range of topics and genres represented are mystery, thriller, nonfiction, debut fiction, poetry, self-help, travel, children’s and teen/young adult.

For a full list of authors, panels, and other information visit www.socobookfest.org

###

Pill-Popping Pets, S.S.R.I.'s for dogs

2008-07-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

Home-Alone Dogs. -- 42% of American dogs sleep in the same beds as their owners...

Excerpted from James Vlahos' Pill-Popping Pets in NY Times Magazine, 7.13.08.

Lead: "Americans are spending millions on mood-altering drugs for their cats and dogs. Is it because we've driven them mad?"

1. Dogs too suffer from separation anxiety and compulsive disorders like hours and hours of tail-chasing.
2. More than 20% of American dogs are overweight.
3. Slentrol, approved by the FDA in 2007 is the country's first canine anti-obesity medication.
4. Aging dogs can become absent-minded ("where did I put the dog dish?").
Pfizer's Anipryl "treats cognitive dysfunction" to help absent-minded dogs remember...
5. "For lonely dogs with separation anxiety, Eli Lilly brought to market its own drug Reconcile last year. The only difference between it and Prozac is that Reconcile is chewable and tastes like beef."

6. Dogs develop mental illnesses "that eerily resemble human ones and respond to the same medications."
7. "Marketers have a new name for the age-old tendency to view animals as furry versions of ourselves: 'humanization,' a trend that is fueling the explosive growth of the pet industry and the rise of modern pet pharma.
8. Americans forked over $49 billion for pet products and services last year, up $11.5 billion from 2003; other than consumer electronics, pet products are the fastest-growing retail segment...
9. The market expansion is being driven both by more pets and by more spending per pet, esp. by affluent baby boomers whose children have graduated from college..." the fastest growing category is health care, with treatments formerly reserved for people--root canals, chemotherapy, liposction, mood pills--being administered to pets.
10."...77 percent of dog owners and 52 percent of cat owners gave their animals some sort of medication in 2006, both up by at least 25 percentage points from 2004. 'Owners want their pets to be more like little well-behaved children.'"

11. Darwin's theory is that evolutionary continuity applies not just to bodies but to brains. "The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind," Darwin wrote.
12. "In laboratory experiments and field observations, practitioners have presented evidence of analogical reasoning by apes, counting by rats and the capacity of pigeons to distinguish the paintings of Picasso from those of Monet."
13. "Prozac, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (S.S.R.I.), prolongs the effects of that neurotransmitter to reduce impulsivity, stabilize moods and lower anxiety, [Dr. Nicholas] Dodman says. He is friends with the noted Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, and they once compared the drugs they employ to treat violent people and animals. 'You superimpose my portfolio on top of his, and it's the same thing,' Dodman says."
14. "There is evidence that animals experience auditory and visual hallucinations and can temporarily enter deluded states in which they attack... 'By engaging in and winning aggressive encounters, dominant animals drive up serotonin levels and gain in composure...' Prozac can boost the effects of the neurotransmitter.
15. "Archaeologists and geneticists estimate that the domestication of wolves (Canis lupus) into dogs began at least 15,000 years ago." See Jack Page's book "Dogs: A Natural History."

16. "Many dogs, 42 percent, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association) now sleep in the same beds as their owners. Extreme attachment to people is one of the defining traits of dogs."
17. "Extreme attachment, unfortunately, also causes some dogs extreme suffering when deprived of their owners' company... an estimated 14 percent or more of American dogs have separation anxiety. The problem signs include home and self-destruction; prolonged whining, barking or drooling; or simply standing by the front door all day in a lonely, panting vigil. ('Nannycam'-type video recorders have captured all of the above.).
18. "...more than half the dogs on the drug [Reconcile] experienced short-term side effects, including lethargy, depression and loss of appetite."
19. "Modern owners are increasingly trying to 'sterilize' pet ownership [Dr. Dunbar says] ... trying to pharmacologically control dogs so that they don't act like dogs. 'What people want is a pet that is on par with a TiVo, that its activity, play and affection are on demand,' he says, 'Then, when they're done, they want to turn it off.'"
20. "Training is basically about forming a relationship, but for some people, that interactive process is now giving the dog a pill." [Dunbar]

21. "Long before Prozac, Paxil and the like were taken by people, they were tested for safety and efficacy in legions of laboratory creature. You can plausibly argue--and Dodman and others do--that humans are in fact using animal drugs."
22.
a. German shepherds tend to tail-chase,
b. Doberman pinschers tend to suck their flanks
c. Cocker spaniels may have genetic underpinings for what looks like psychotic rage...

23. "...the causes of mood disorders and obsessions in humans and our pets aren't so different--faulty genetics, dreary environments..." [Dodman]

24. "All of the behavioral issues that we have created in ourselves, we are now creating in our pets because they live in the same unhealthy environments that we do... that's why there is a market for these drugs." [unnamed pharmaceutical company executive]

25. The healthiest dogs in America today belong to homeless men and women, says the "dog whisperer." They're well enough behaved so they can move about without leashes, they get plenty of exercise, forage for food... and, in short, unlike the druggies, they're allowed to be dogs.

----

"Americans are spending millions on mood-altering drugs for their cats and dogs. Is it because we've driven them mad?"

Pill-Popping Pets, by James Vlahos, NY Times Mag. 7.13.08

sperm

2008-07-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

father's day image from NY Times.

Brain fitness class, neuron

2008-07-08T00:36:00.000-07:00

Structure of typical neuron... image from Wikipedia.

Taking a Brain Fitness class. Notes from first three hours... learned that MRIs show "Islands of Inactivity" in the brains of those fried by marijuana.

Twelve or so students show up and, when asked why we are taking the class, one woman says she'd had a brain aneurism (sp?) and wanted "to find out what's left." Another had had electric shock therapy... others, like myself, were having problems remembering names. Insomnia can mess with the brain... poor diet, booze, drugs, trauma... all of us, for whatever reason, sensing some slippage. A loose connection of two...

Learned that there are as many brain cells (billions!) as there are visible (?) stars in the galaxy. That some dendrites are very long. Several inches... That giraffes, so said the instructor, have brain cells that are 6 to 8 feet long and that every cell in the brain is replaced every 7 or 8 years. So you have, so speak, a different brain now than you did eight years ago when George Bush first became President.

Talked to 81 year old man who lives in a Senior Trailer park. "There are funerals every day... they're going like flies... they're going like dying is going out of style."

Just as continents eons ago were once joined in a solid mass, for example, Australia and South America; China, Alaska and North America, so too were our brains once more of a piece, so said the instructor. "You generate new brain cells all the time... right up to the minute you die, you're generating new brain cells." And brain cells travel to where they are needed. The brain of a musician is different from the brain of an athlete. But if an athlete seeks to become a musician, the brain cells begin to accommodate. There's something called brain plasticity... instructor says, Until your last breath your mind can change.

Melancholy, Baron Wormser

2008-07-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

Melancholy
by Baron Wormser*

Weakness—the pale succumbing to loneliness,
Refusing to admit anyone else, indulging
The blue perquisites of adolescence
Long past their sensible deliquescence.

He knew it but went on drinking and regretting,
Not calling his friends and regretting,
Making scenes over nothing and regretting.
It helped to make him despise himself,

Which was, he sensed, what he wanted. He was
Then, in his oblique way, at ease to wander
The city's brazen or quiet streets, conjuring
Random lives and how the slim arc
Of emotion was pulverized. Back home, he put
On some Monk, lay down, half-cried.

"Melancholy" by Baron Wormser, from Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems. © Sarabande Books, 2008. Reprinted here with permission of the poet.

*Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000 he was writer in residence at the University of South Dakota. For eight years he led the Frost Place Seminar at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.

L.A. Times, Tassajara, Big Sur fires...

2008-06-28T21:57:00.000-07:00

[photo from L.A. Times]

Retired English teacher, I pride myself on an ability to recognize an author's style... Frost, Eliot, Pound... Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth... yeah, I'm of another generation. So tonight, reading L.A. Times for news of the Tassajara, Big Sur fires... I'm startled to recognize the voice of a particular reporter, the author of a feature titled "Tempest in the Treetops," L.A. Times, Tues., Sept. 17, 2002. The subtitle to that Column One, front page feature has some bearing on today's calamity: "Some prize the blue gum eucalyptus for its beauty and scent, while others see a messy fire hazard. Battles are being waged across California."

I've read other pieces by that reporter, but had no idea who had written the following until I came across the lines,

"Hours before sunrise, the 20 remaining monks still meditate and chant.

"Buddhist tenets say that all things are impermanent, and fire can be a great teacher in that," said Alec Henderson, a former defense attorney from Los Angeles who forswore material wealth to take up the Zen creed of "one robe, one bowl."

Henderson left Wednesday with the task of safekeeping Ginger, the monastery dog. Now he's holding his breath, along with thousands of Zen followers and former Tassajara guests, hoping the monastery emerges intact.

But if the flames prove too tough to defeat, the monks plan to retreat along with the Forest Service firefighters.

"We won't risk anybody to save the buildings," said Devin Patel, a bearded 28-year-old who serves as the monastery's fire marshal.

"The buildings can burn, but you can't actually burn down Tassajara. Fire can never touch Tassajara's heart."

And then, somehow, I knew without looking who had written it, The L.A. Times feature writer, Eric Bailey. And, not far from Tassajara, ourselves living near a eucalyptus grove with the ever-present danger of Urban Wildfire, as opposed to forest fire, I somehow took heart in the Buddhist tenet that "all things are impermanent, and fire can be a great teacher in that." It's the first time in days that I felt uplifted, odd to say... almost inspired by something I read in a newspaper. One takes something away from the poems one reads, from fiction and nonfiction... Jesus, maybe it was the context and our own situation re: Urban wildfire... the risk... of loss... home and... all that's in it. And yet, and yet... [reading this over, retired English teacher, I'd mark it up... awful, awful writing... oh, fuck it! I'm just trying to make a point.]

Anyway, excerpting more from Eric Bailey's 6.27.08 story:

"...By Wednesday, flames were just three miles to the west. The sheriff ordered an evacuation, but a skeleton crew was allowed to stay.

They cut branches, raked leaves and laid out fire hose. They triple-checked the two big pumps that can be used to draw water from the 50,000-gallon swimming pool and the riffles of Tassajara Creek.

As ash fell from the sky, Mako Voelkel, the monastery's tenzo, or cook, was cutting fire breaks as well as vegetables.

"I'm feeling pretty good about it," she said. "We're prepared."

She and the others were working from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., with time off only for meals.

Fires hit the monastery twice in the last three decades. In 1977 and 1999, flames burned all around the complex. Each time, the losses were kept relatively minor, thanks to the firefighting monks and professional crews from the U.S. Forest Service.

That's auspicious: With its remote locale, the monastery can't get fire insurance.

David Zimmerman, Tassajara director, expects a rerun. The monks will don yellow, flame-resistant fire jackets and yellow helmets with protective shrouds and will work to stamp out spot fires. Everyone, he said, feels "happy and honored to be here right now."

Late Friday, help arrived. A Forest Service strike team pulled in, along with a 30-man crew of firefighting inmates. They'll be fed out of the monastery kitchen.

Hours before sunrise, the 20 remaining monks still meditate and chant.

"Buddhist tenets say that all things are impermanent, and fire can be a great teacher in that," said Alec Henderson, a former defense attorney from Los Angeles who forswore material wealth to take up the Zen creed of "one robe, one bowl."

Henderson left Wednesday with the task of safekeeping Ginger, the monastery dog. Now he's holding his breath, along with thousands of Zen followers and former Tassajara guests, hoping the monastery emerges intact.

But if the flames prove too tough to defeat, the monks plan to retreat along with the Forest Service firefighters.

"We won't risk anybody to save the buildings," said Devin Patel, a bearded 28-year-old who serves as the monastery's fire marshal.

"The buildings can burn, but you can't actually burn down Tassajara. Fire can never touch Tassajara's heart."

eric.bailey@latimes.com

Killer Of Killer Trees Out On A Limb, Eucalyptus Worship vs. Urban Wildfire

2008-06-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

Eucalyptus Worship versus Urban Wildfire. See Mike Neff's Web Del Sol / The Potomac / a journal of poetry and poetics (Washington, D.C.) for more on this story.

The issue: 1) we and our neighbors live near a grove of blue gum eucalyptus, AKA "gasoline trees"; 2) summer is now upon us and so, too, is the risk of urban wildfire; 3) after 20 years of debate, the issue is still unresolved.

Now, following the "Martin Fire," our neighbors and friends in Bonny Doon are moving back into their homes, i.e., those lucky enough to still have a home!
-----

The story:

So there was the headline, “The killer of killer trees is out on a limb in Santa Cruz... with a lead, “Robert Sward, 68, of Santa Cruz, doesn’t look, sound or act like a tree murderer.”

The paper, The Sacramento Bee, after a few kind words about my poetry (“his verse, more lovely than any weed tree...”) went on, “One might suppose Robert would obey the city ordinance that protects ‘heritage trees.’ Instead, he flings it down and dances upon it.”

Yes, much as I love Santa Cruz, I’ve been at war with the city fathers, the majority of whom defend all trees no matter where they came from or what idiot planted them in the wrong hemisphere because only God can make a tree. [I'm paraphrasing here from a feature on blue gum eucs in Audubon Magazine.]

“These so-called progressives speak in a way that would delight Lewis Carroll,” I am quoted as saying. “A local version of the Duchess recently told me, ‘Diseased or not, two blue gum eucs constitute a grove... and the tree you removed was a member of a grove.’ All that was missing from our exchange was a queen to declare, ‘Off with his head!’”

The blue gum eucalyptus—or ‘gasoline tree,’ as firefighters call it—is an invasive exotic from Australia that evolved with fire. Fire doesn’t kill blue gums. Instead, it clears out the competition and opens their seed pods.

Soon after murdering a tree, I stood before Santa Cruz City Council, our lawyer present, facing a $9000.fine. For what? Removing one euc and lopping off a few branches from another.

The grove in question, the four or five shallow-rooted, fire-prone monsters endangering our home, is situated on our property, property on which we pay taxes. Our property, our trees, our taxes.

It all started in 1991 with the Oakland Hills/Berkeley fire which killed 20 people and caused more than $5 billion damage. Fire officials determined the blue gum euc was a key cause of that tragedy and also the fire storm that later struck Australia. Australia, where the shallow-rooted, unstable gasoline trees are also known as ‘widow-makers.’ Why? Because of their tendency to drop heavy branches or fall over without warning.

After reading about the Oakland Hills fire, I did a little research. What I learned was that eucs are the original burn baby burn trees. A little lightning, a careless smoker, a kid with a firecracker, that’s all it takes.

Hearing of our plight, which we share with hundreds of other Californians, the Los Angeles Times ran a front page feature, “Tempest in the Treetops... Some prize the blue gum eucalyptus for its beauty and scent, while others see a messy fire hazard. Battles are being waged across California.”

“After a decade of unsuccessfully fighting City Hall for permission to ax his grove, Sward—a poet, retired college professor and avowed environmentalist—resorted to a botanical form of civil disobedience. He hired a tree cutter to take them out.

“Scarcely had the buzz of the chain saw kicked up when city parks inspectors—‘tree police,’ as some locals call them—stepped in, halted the cutting and hit Sward with fines initially totaling $9,000.”

Maybe I should have known better when, in 1985, I moved here and learned that the most popular film ever shown in Santa Cruz was The King of Hearts, starring Alan Bates. In World War I, as a German army retreats, they booby-trap the whole town to explode. The locals flee and a gaggle of cheerful lunatics escape the asylum and take over.

Again, I love Santa Cruz. I love the people... so much so that prior to the 1991 Oakland Hills fire I might have been persuaded to strip naked, join hands with my friends, encircle and protect a euc tree—see photo above!

But then, after what I learned, innocent no more, I tasted the true nature of the tree.

Yes, I was once politically correct. A stoned out of his mind innocent. Yes, yes, and holier than thou. That was in the days before political correctness became a force that would determine the outcome of elections. That was back before I became “an enemy of the people.” That is, an enemy of the blue gum euc. Fucking trees.

You don’t run for office, certainly not in this arena, unless you’re PC and pro-euc. Hence the power of those who would fine us $9,000.

That, in brief, is the story. True, City Council later reduced the fine to $1500., which our lawyer suggested we pay.

“All of which has Santa Cruz’s tree-killing poet [and his neighbors] bewildered,” says the L.A. Times. Yes, it’s true. I am bewildered.

“Sward doesn’t see the sense of it: These are his trees. This is his danger.

“’There are people in Santa Cruz, Sward said, ‘who believe the blue gum euc is more important than human life.’” And that’s not an exaggeration. An esteemed arbortist who himself works for the city told me, “There are people on Santa Cruz City Council who wouldn’t move a eucalyptus if it were lying across the body of a small child.”

Anyway, the blue gum eucs are still there. The grove overhanging our home is still there. The politically correct are still in charge. Nice people, well-intentioned. And so it is we, and thousands of other Californians, face another year with our homes and our lives, and our children’s lives, still at risk.

We're talking here about urban wild fires. "Okay, so what would constitute an emergency whereby we could chop 'em down?" I once asked a politically saavy fire chief. "Well, the trees would actually have to be on fire. Then you could remove 'em!" he replied.

Beverly Hills, 90210

2008-06-11T18:23:00.000-07:00

[I have my daughter Hannah Sward's permission to run this brief excerpt from a work in progress, Diary of a Non-Starlet]

"On the Set of Beverly Hills, 90210”

Author’s note: Chloe is an L.A.-based, aspiring 22 year old actress with a Master of Dramatic Arts degree working as a TV and movie extra -- and stripper -- while she waits to break into the Hollywood scene. What follows is the opening section of a book titled Diary of a Non-Starlet. A work of fiction, the book begins January 3, 1997.

January 3 - Breaking in

Some people do this for a living. They’re the ones with portable lawn chairs, a small wardrobe they carry around everywhere on hangers and a cellular phone to make endless calls about the next day’s work. Some even have a call-in service that they pay for and that guarantees them five days of work each week as an extra. They’re the “professionals.” The average day is eight to twelve hours on the set. The first eight hours pays $50. for non-union and $100. for union members. Anything after that is overtime.

Naturally, everyone tries to get into the union and not only for the money. Union members get treated with a tad more respect. Union members are one rung up from the bottom.

For example, on some shows non-union extras get paper bag lunches while union members are allowed to walk over to the catering truck and eat whatever and whenever they want. There’s always a professional chef on hand, pancakes, grilled rosemary chicken… you name it!

When it happens to be a big cattle call, it feels quite barbaric. I feel kind of embarrassed ambling over to the catering truck in front of all the other extras. Like I’m some princess. Sometimes some famished soul asks me to bring back a hot roast beef sandwich. I hate it. If I were to say no, it’s like I’m some sort of Nazi. And if I say yes, I feel like some sort of spy smuggling contraband over the border.

Most of us haven’t given up hope of one day becoming what we went to school and trained for – to find paying work as actors and actresses with lines.

They don’t say ‘Extras’ when they call you, they just say, ‘Background.’ It sounds harsh, but really that’s all you are. And so you go where you’re told. You become what you are called, “Background.”

Mr. Megaphone picks up his instrument. “Background,” he bellows, and everyone puts down their books, magazines, junk food, etc., climbs out of their lawn chairs, and mope over to the designated spot. My habit of making the best of every situation doesn’t apply to this lousy job and I hate the happy nerds, the enthusiastic extras who jump up and try to look as if they’re having a good time.

Yet here I am . . . but what’s the appeal?

I get to read and write and there’s lots of leisure time and I don’t mind getting paid for that, even if it’s only $100. I’d rather do this than wait tables . . . so I’m doing this while waiting for a chance to act, which is what makes this extra work somehow endurable.

And it’s a continual process. You may land one acting job, but that doesn’t mean there’s going to be another and so you still have to do something in between . . . jobs in between jobs to pay your rent.

[sample... more to come...]

(copyright (c) 2008, Hannah Sward)

--

Hannah Sward lives in Los Angeles and is a recent graduate of Antioch University. Another sample of her writing, "Starving," may be found in Alimentum, The Literature of Food, Issue 4, 2007. Hannah's stories have appeared in a number of online publications.

www.alimentumjournal.com

Sleeping Homeless Princess

2008-05-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

Gloria Alford's piece, The Jaded Princess, appears above (at the top). The original, Gloria's inspiration (hers is consciously modeled after the jade burial suit of Chinese Princess Tou Wan, Han Dynasty, 140 B.C.), appears below.

Now for something completely different.

Moving from Emily Gould, Gawker and the NY Times (yesterday's posting) to something closer to home. We're re-visiting Gloria Alford's sculpture The Jaded Princess, now on display at Santa Cruz’ Museum of Art and History. She's part of the museum-wide MAH exhibit, Ying: Inspired by the Art and History of China, scheduled to end July 1. After that date the oft-exhibited Princess will be technically homeless.

At the opening, Paul Figueroa, the Museum’s Executive Director, spoke of the "breath-taking impact" of Gloria's Jaded Princess, which, "as a replica of an historical artifact transferred to the contemporary immediately sets the 'tone' for the gallery."

Following a showing at the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, the director, June Braucht, wrote, “A lot of excitement left the Museum when we returned your exhibition. I really hated to see it leave.The show was one of the very few ‘modern’ shows we’ve had that was as popular with the conservatives as it was with the more avant garde enthusiasts. All comments were favorable as is evidenced in your guest book.”

Earlier, exhibited in a show titled Technology and Art, Metro San Jose wrote, “The show could begin and end with Gloria Alford’s The Jaded Princess and have said it all. Lying in state in her Plexiglas coffin, the figure, constructed of meticulously wired, jade-green computer rchips and soldered lead, replete with a scalloped headdress of round chips the color of tarnished bronze, calls to mind Buddhist temple sculpture, medieval church monuments and mummies—icons of a culture’s revered elite, studied by anthroplogists for insight into past practices...”

Sarah Handler, author of Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical Furniture, writes, “Mirroring the famous burial suit of the Chinese princess Tou Wan, constructed of pieces of jade which, like a great cathedral, took a generation to carve, Gloria Alford suits her princess out in a stunning coat of computer chips. Using lifeless chips, she brings face and body alive in serene beauty. With the electricity of creation, she resurrects the princess for our time. Inspired by the second-century B.C.E. jade suit, she transforms a Chinese tradition into an original and imaginative work of art.”

The Princess draws rave reviews and, retired English teacher, I've been lazy. I'm the composer of business letters, self-appointed agent. So I keep promising I'll write on my wife's behalf, approach some likely venues, curators, directors... "What about the National Museum of Women in the Arts?" I ask. "Or that Computer Museum in Palo Alto? Or the Tech Museum in San Jose? Or Google, say? Or Intel? Sun? Oracle? Microsoft... Bill and Melinda Gates?"

We think of loaning the piece with a footnote that it could be purchased. I dunno. Other things get in the way. Even now. Here I am working on my blog. The show ends June 30. I'm gonna make some coffee. I'm gonna write some letters.

--
Gloria's piece appears above (at the top). The original, Gloria's inspiration (hers is consciously modeled after the jade burial suit of Chinese Princess Tou Wan, Han Dynasty, 140 B.C.), appears below.

Exposed, Emily Gould

2008-05-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

Blog-Post Confidential

Emily Gould feature in NY Times Magazine, 5.25.08

Sit down with the Sunday Times planning on skimming, racing through the news, week in review, book section, etc., and getting on to The Day. Stuff that needs to get done. My To Do list. Instead, get caught up with Emily Gould's "Blog-Post Confidential" feature. Then see how, for me at least, it connects with panic attacks, depression and, strange as it may sound, soul-retrieval. I haven't forgotten what this blog, drswardscureformelancholia, is about, and skirt the issue as I may, it's there. As is the idea of a cure, namely, that the cure for melancholia (dramatic and implausible as that may sound) is to be found in the recovery of...

If psychology is the study of the soul, psyche (soul or spirit) - ology (the study of), some think the "answer," if there is an answer, is in the recovery of what has been lost. Speaking from experience, zombie-days, zombie-hood, well, I've been writing about that in the new book*. And the intersection between zombie-hood and what, for want of a better term, I call "soul retrieval." There's at least one book on the subject, a book titled "Soul Retrieval." So, I'm not the first and there's nothing original in what I'm suggesting. Anyway, back to the Sunday Times. I highlight a couple items from Emily Gould's "Exposed."

1. "I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there's a place where a record of their existence is kept...

2. "But because we were so busy, we continued to I.M. most of the time, even when we were sitting right next to each other. Soon it stopped seeming weird to me when one of us would type a joke and the other one would type 'Hahahahahaha' in lieu of actually laughing.

3. "I was initially put off by Julia' naked attention-whoring--'Attention is my drug,' she often confessed.

4. "A week later, I found myself lying on the floor of the bathroom in the Gawker office... felled by a panic attack that put me out of commission for the rest of the day.

Famous for 15 people

5. "Whenever I left this comfort zone, I would be seized by one of my irrational, heart-pounding meltdowns, which I would studiously conceal from my fellow subway passengers or pedestrians. The panic attacks were about a desire to be invisible, but if I showed any sign of having one, everyone would pay attention to me."

---
* Sample of work on the subject appears now in Bear Flag Republic, Prose Poems and Poetics from California, edited by Christopher Buckley and Gary Young. Four of my poems in this anthology, including "A Face to Sadden God" -- with a section which begins, "There are three parts to the human soul..."

PORTRAIT OF AN L.A. DAUGHTER

2008-05-24T00:15:00.000-07:00

seeing-stars.com

PORTRAIT OF AN L.A. DAUGHTER

Take #1

Braided blonde hair
white and pink barrettes
Bette Davis gorgeous
I hug her
dreamy daughter with no make-up
silver skull and crossbones
middle
finger
ring
three or four others in each ear
rings in her navel
rings on her thumbs
gentle moonchild
“pal” she announces
to “Porno for Pyros”
formerly the group “Jane’s Addiction”
“Nothing’s Shocking”
with Perry Farrell
Dave Navarro on guitar
and Stephen Perkins
on drums
Ain’t No Right they sing.
“What are you,
some kind of groupy?” I ask.
She says nothing.
Just turns up the volume.
Been Caught Stealing
they sing.

I hold her
Wet ‘n’ Wild lip gloss
diamond stud earrings
and glitter on her cheeks

Wan, she’s looking wan
my dancing daughter

Hannah Davi –a new name–
walk-on in the movie Day Of Atonement
with Christopher Walken

And a part in a Levitz Furniture ad
(“it’s work”)
and a part in an MCI commercial
(“Best Friends”)
breaking in
Brotherhood Of Justice

a Swiss Alps bar-maid
(“classic blonde Gretel”)
in a Folger’s Coffee commercial

“Grunge is in,” she says
visiting Santa Cruz,
“any Goodwills around?”

* * *
Flashback

Appearing,
“crowning” says the doctor

“Hannah” says her mother
“the name means ‘grace’”

Two-year-old drooling
as I toss her into space
and back
she falls
and back
into space again

Flawless teeth and perfect smile
one blue eye slightly larger than the other
her three-thousand miles away mother
still present as
two as one
two breathing together
we three breathe again as one
Hannah O Hannah

--
(Reprinted from The Collected Poems, Black Moss Press, 2004,
and Four Incarnations, Coffee House Press, 1991)

Hannah

2008-05-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

HANNAH

Her third eye is strawberry jam

has a little iris in it

her eyelids

are red

she's sleepy

and the milk

has gone down

the wrong way.

I've just had breakfast

with the smallest person in the world.

(Reprinted from The Collected Poems, Black Moss Press, 2004,
and Four Incarnations, Coffee House Press, 1991)

One critic dismissed the HANNAH poem above as "sentimental." Sentimentality is said to be the exaggeration of feeling, feeling for its own sake. But what if you really feel it and feel it in the way the images and tone, etc., suggest you feel it?

There's another kind of exaggeration: opting for easy irony, an irony that will impress people though you may or may not really feel what you're setting down on the page. You'll get more attention in a writers' workshop with irony than you will with, dare I say it? honesty, saying what you're really feeling.

Above all else in a writers' workshop you want to be "cool." The inner circle of most workshops is made up of people you can count on to be "cool." Cooler than you, cooler than me, cooler than thou.

At the Iowa Writers' Workshop sentimentality was to be avoided at all costs. We were taught to be _anything_ but sentimental. Irony was OK because if you were ironic you couldn't be held accountable for anything you might have been feeling. That is, no one could accuse you of being sentimental and, if they were to accuse you of being sentimental, you could always say, "No, no, I was just being ironic. Surely you're not taking me seriously!"

If there's irony, you can more easily defend yourself. Further, the use of irony implies there's another level, maybe several levels, of meaning. We all want to write poems with more than one level of meaning.

Uncle Dog: The Poet at 9

2008-05-16T13:22:00.001-07:00

Photo by Lynn Lundstrum Swanger

Kai is serving here as place holder. He has the attitude and manner of famed *Uncle Dog, though not the "mongrelness" of that legendary animal, a nine-year-old's vision of a Chicago garbage man's dog.

Uncle Dog was the first animal I ever saw who seemed to have some sense of purpose, dignity, pride, and self-regard. Fuck the human species. This Heinz 57 mutt refused to cringe or bark, or in any way even acknowledge other dogs. ‘Uncle Dog.’ He was the one who rode around with the once-weekly garbage man. This was Chicago back in the mid-1940s, and we lived on the second floor of a two-flat apartment. Rent: $65. a month. And the best of it was our back porch where I hung out with animals. But never my favorite, the garbage man's dog, dog of dogs!

I think of him now in our age of "companion animals," "designer dogs," a time when 69 million American households have dogs--73.9 million dogs! Dogs. Dogs. 39 billion dollars a year goes for the care and feeding of American pets.

Anyway, more than any family member or school teacher or, for that matter, yoga instructor... it was Uncle Dog who taught me the importance of carriage and self-regard. Self-respect. We’d gotten dogs from that notorious Cook County prison (c. 1940), the Chicago Humane Society and, no fault of their own, those canines were a sorry lot. Three hungry days in a cage and, broken-spirited... either they were“selected” by some dog-lover or were gassed. That's where we got some real "suspects," canines picked up off the street... dogs without street smarts, without credentials, without license. without class ...victims of human self-regard, the ruling class, "human exceptionalism."

Uncle Dog. The mongrel prince of princes. Dog of dogs.

In 1957 at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop I wrote the thing. And, surprise! it got accepted by the Chicago Review. Then the Chicago Review Anthology, Hayden Carruth’s The Voice That is Great Within Us, David Swanger's The Poem as Process, and some others. And, in low moments, needing publication to nourish my ego, to do for me whatever needs doing... needing inspiration, a voice from the past... no barking, no, speaking rather...

I can hear him now: Woof, woof! Woof fuckin' woof!
---

*UNCLE DOG: THE POET AT 9

I did not want to be old Mr.
Garbage man, but uncle dog
who rode sitting beside him.

Uncle dog had always looked
to me to be truck-strong
wise-eyed, a cur-like Ford

Of a dog. I did not want
to be Mr. Garbage man because
all he had was cans to do.

Uncle dog sat there me-beside-him
emptying nothing. Barely even
looking from garbage side to side:

Like rich people in the backseats
of chauffeur-cars, only shaggy
in an unwagging tall-scrawny way.

Uncle dog belonged any just where
he sat, but old Mr. Garbage man
had to stop at everysingle can.

I thought. I did not want to be Mr.
Everybody calls them that first.
A dog is said, Dog! Or by name.

I would rather be called Rover
than Mr. And sit like a tough
smart mongrel beside a garbage man.

Uncle dog always went to places
unconcerned, without no hurry.
Independent like some leashless

Toot. Honorable among scavenger
can-picking dogs. And with a bitch
at every other can. And meat:

His for the barking. Oh, I wanted
to be uncle dog--sharp, high fox-
eared, cur-Ford truck-faced

With his pick of the bones.
A doing, truckman's dog
and not a simple child-dog

Nor friend to man, but an uncle
travelling, and to himself--
and a bitch at every second can.

(from Four Incarnations, Coffee House Press, 1991 and The Collected Poems,
Black Moss Press, 2006, Literary Press Group, distributor.)

2008 Santa Cruz Film Festival, Kerouac, Big Sur...

2008-05-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

Fri., May 9, World Premier of ONE FAST MOVE OR I'M GONE: KEROUAC'S BIG SUR, A DOCUMENTARY by Curt Worden, Del Mar Theater. Hundreds of people turn out, $20. a ticket, standing room only... our little town, pop. 56,000, with two, three film festivals a year.

Headline in Metro Santa Cruz: On the Rocks, The Santa Cruz Film Festival opens with Jack Kerouac's Big Sur breakdown.

Based on Kerouac's 1962 book, Big Sur, the film, with extraordinary footage of Big Sur, the scene around Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin near Bixby Canyon... Kerouac's agent, Sterling Lord; poet Michael McClure; Ferlinghetti; Carolyn Cassady; Patti Smith... all making an appearance. One of the finest documentaries I've seen... and Santa Cruz, situated half way between San Francisco and Big Sur, draws an enthusiastic audience, average age, I would guess, early 40s... scattering of younger people, scattering of folks in their 70s and older...

Metro SC says, "The Big Sur trip was a farewell to the three-cornered love [Kerouac] had for the Cassadys. Neither Jack nor Neal would make it out of the 1960s alive. Ultimately, poet Gregory Corso's judgment of Big Sur seems the sanest: 'He needs help.'"

--
Press Release:

Welcome to the 2008 Santa Cruz Film Festival

The Santa Cruz Film Festival is a growing international festival that fosters cross cultural exchange by screening independent films and producing multi-disciplined art events throughout the year.
Since the inaugural year (honored by The Downtown Business Assoc. as the Cultural Event of the Year) our programming has championed voices and stories that are often left out of mainstream cinema. We have presented films from 5 continents.

The Santa Cruz Film Festival presents nine days of non-stop, truly independent film screenings from May 9-17, 2008. Venues include: The Del Mar, The Rio Theatre, The Museum of Art and History, The Regal Riverfront Twin, Community TV, and the Cayuga Vault.

This year the Festival will present over 140 films from 26 countries, 17 World Premieres, and 4 US Premieres The fest will screen 41 Documentaries, 76 Narratives, 15 Animation, 21 Experimental, 43 Student 22 Local Grown, and 12 - 18 years of age films all of which will be in consideration for SCFF’s Audience Awards. The Jury winning documentary will receive a World Premier on Link TV.

Our community is reflected in our programming. 20% of our films are internationally produced, 10% are locally produced, and approximately 50% are produced or directed by women. 15%-20% are programmed for a GLBT audience. 10%-15% are by or about Latinos. 10% are youth-produced (under 18 years of age) including by students at high schools in Watsonville, Aptos, Scotts Valley, and Santa Cruz.

According to the Santa Cruz County Visitors and Convention Bureau, the SCFF has brought 1 million dollars to Santa Cruz County businesses since its inception in 2001. Over 23% of festival attendees come from outside of the county. The festival promotes Santa Cruz globally, while contributing to the economy and enhancing the collective cultural awareness locally.

The Santa Cruz Film Festival strives to engage in cultural and artistic diplomacy.

Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came To Canada in Vietnam War Era

2008-05-08T14:05:00.000-07:00

A Migration of Poets

Mail brings copy of new anthology Crossing Lines - Poets Who Came To Canada in the Vietnam Era, Seraphim Editions, Canada.

Edited by Massachusetts-born poet Allan Briesmaster and L.A. -born Steven Michael Berzensky (Mick Burrs), Crossing Lines includes the work of 76 men and women who grew up in the U.S. and then immigrated to Canada in the Vietnam War era (1965-75).

As noted in the Preface (A Migration of Poets), “…thousands of American women also emigrated during the historic period of upheaval and change in both countries… about a third of our Crossing Lines poets are women.”

And, as the editors point out, “Although the Vietnam war and the Draft and anti-war protests were prominent in the news of the time, individual circumstances differed greatly, even among those wishing to avoid ‘crossing the line’ into military service. These varied circumstances are in plain view in some of the poems here as well as in the contributors’ bios. At least two of the poets (Kolos, Sward) actually served in the U.S. armed forces” [I served in the combat zone in U.S. Navy during the Korean War and, exempt from the draft, came to serve as Poet in Residence at the University of Victoria (1969 - 1972) before moving to Toronto].

Apart from the draft, many came to Canada seeking opportunity or a fresh start; many were university students or, like myself, teachers…

Judging by their poetry, many contributors seem to have had little involvement with the politics of the day, or even with the counter-culture… they write instead of their feelings and experiences in making the transition—loneliness, a sense of separation, a lowering of expectations, the difficulty of finding work… and some write of going back as more difficult than leaving.

What did these people contribute to Canada? The editors observe, “One quality that characterizes this particular immigrant group is a dynamic individualism, a widely acknowledged American trait which they each brought undeclared across the border, prodding them to contribute something distinctive to Canada’s culture."

Press Release (see below)

THE BOOK BAND
Representing the Best of Small Press

P.O. Box 3471, Stn. C. Hamilton ON L8H 7M1
Voice: 905-545-5274 Fax: 905-545-5208 E-mail: info@thebookband.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 2008

Anthology Reflects America’s Loss, Canada’s Gain

Seraphim Editions (www.seraphimedtions.com) is proud to publish Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era, an unprecedented 256-page, 76-poet anthology of poetry by men and women who grew up in the United States and emigrated to Canada during the years 1965-75.

Some of the poets came north to avoid crossing the line into military service; a few came after completing their stint; and still others, who were exempt from the Draft, chose Canada for a fresh start in life, many of them as students and teachers. Individual histories, literary careers, and writing styles differ widely, but all were fundamentally affected by their change of country.

Crossing Lines explores numerous themes related both to the turbulent decade 1965-75 and to our own time: including personal responses to the Vietnam War itself, reflections on war in general and war today, thoughts on leaving home and familiar places, memoirs of arrival and a new beginning, and, above all, a longing for peace. Many of these writers have achieved great literary distinction, and as a group they represent a cultural phenomenon which has been insufficiently recognized both in Canada and the U.S.

Publisher Maureen Whyte notes: “This book reveals some of the voices which helped to shape the styles and themes of Canadian poetry in the late 20th Century and beyond. I am very excited to contribute such an important addition to Canada’s literary legacy.” The moving and outspoken poems collected here will interest students and lovers of poetry on both sides of the border, and will be uniquely valuable to Canadian Studies programs, and to historians.

Founded in 1995, Seraphim Editions publishes the works of established and emerging writers from across Canada.

For more information about Crossing Lines and upcoming readings in Canada and the U.S., or to arrange an interview with editors Allan Briesmaster or Steven Michael Berzensky, please contact Trudi at The Book Band, info@thebookband.com

--

Maureen Whyte, Publisher
Seraphim Editions
238 Emerald Street North
Hamilton, Ontario
Canada L8L 5K8

Telephone: 905-525-5509
Facsimile: 905-525-0332
E-mail: info@seraphimeditions.com

Paul Blackburn, Re-visited

2008-05-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

Paul Blackburn about to lift rock... mid-1960s, probably in vicinity of Aspen, Colorado.

Link to Jerry Rothenberg and more on Paul Blackburn...

With thanks to University of Pennsylvania Professor Al Filreis...

---

Nearly half a century after Paul Blackburn read these lines [see below] aloud in one of our kitchen colloquies, the lines are fresh as ever. I can still hear his voice. And, certainly, Paul was an influence on the work I was doing then, Kissing the Dancer, Cornell Univ. Press, 1964, and now, God is in the Cracks, Black Moss Press, 2006.

As for generosity of spirit, Paul was the first poet I met who seemed to have that quality and, 50 years later, he’s still pretty much at the top of the list. Yeah, and to Paul’s name I’d add perhaps two or three others.

Paul Blackburn’s 1954 “statement” of poetics was published in The Parallel Voyages, Sun-Gemini Press, 1987.
Please see The Parallel Voyages for correct formatting.

“My poetry may not be typically American, or at least in matter, not
solely so: but I think it does make use of certain techniques which, even
when not invented by American poets, find their particular exponents
there in contemporary letters, from Pound & Doctor Williams, to younger
writers like Paul Carroll or Duncan or Creeley.

"Techniques of juxtaposition.
Techniques of speech rhythms,
sometimes very intense,
sometimes developed slowly, as
one would have
conversation with a friend.

"Personally, I affirm two things:
the possibility of warmth & contact
in the human relationship :
as juxtaposed against the materialistic pig of a technological world,
where relationships are only ‘useful’ i.e., exploited, either
psychologically or materially.

"...the possibility of s o n g
within that world: which is like saying ‘yes’ to sunlight.

"On the matter of song: I believe there must be a return toward the
musical structure of poetry, just as there must be, for certain people at
least, a return to warmth within a relationship.

"However impractical that may seem in a society controlled in some of its
most intimate aspects by monstrous, which are totally irresponsible,
corporations, organized for the greatest gain of the most profit: and whose
natural growth, like that of any organism, is toward monopoly,
self-support, self-completion, self-
perpetuation,
and eventually self-competition and self-destruction.

"In a world that is so quickly losing its individuals, it can only be the
individuals who persist, who can work any change of direction, i.e. control
the machines, or destroy them.

"Machines can be very beneficent as means

"to a better
(materially better)
life, as either
democratizing or socializing agents.
But as a means to control for the limited number of men who now own them,

"(but the president or general manager of the corporation
really owns nothing but his own salary (and his power) so that
even the controlling minds of these gigantic corporate machines
are irresponsible. That is, not subject to the effects
of their own decisions)

"(and
the personnel, the individuals
are replaceable, all the way to the top. The machine, the organisation, has
itself created the position and will function without the individual, has,
in that sense created the person to fill the ‘p o s i t i o n’
and its own needs) so that
when, in these upper reaches, the ‘organisation’ the machine itself
becomes master, it can only mean disaster, global and particular.

"I do not claim that a greater frequency of rhyme than is now made use of
in American poetry will, in time, set things right.

"Only that if a man could sing the poems his poets write

— and could understand them — and if

"the poets would sing something from their guts, rather than
the queasy contents of same,
then that man would stand a better
chance, of being a whole man, than
him who stands or sits and says but ‘Yes’ all day.

"Enough man to stand where it is necessary to take a stand.

"To give
and man enough to receive, LOVE,
when he finds it offered.

"To take the sun and the goods of the earth, while it lasts.
and to
fight in whatever way he can
the monstrous machines that try, and will try, to

"o b l i t e r a t e him, for

$1 more."

---

[See preceding April 28 post for more on Paul Blackburn].

Jerome Rothenberg webcast, Paul Blackburn...

2008-04-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

Poet / Translator Paul Blackburn

re: Jerry Rothenberg webcast - University of Pennsylvania - Writers House Fellows Program

Invited to email question(s) for Jerry Rothenberg April 29 webcast, I think of my old friend Paul Blackburn, poet and translator who died in 1971 at age 44. Given Rothenberg's work with Ethnopoetics, I recall Blackburn introducing, opening up a whole new world of poetry... reading aloud for me his translations from Spanish of the medieval epic Poema del Mio Cid, of the poetry of Frederico Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz and the short stories of Julio Cortazar. Paul at the time (mid-1960s) was Cortazar's literary agent in the U.S.

Question: "Paul Blackburn was a dear and valued friend. I knew him in New York in the 1960s and it was Paul who introduced me and other writers to Julio Cortazar, Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz... and Provençal poetry. To what extent did Paul Blackburn influence you and your work with Ethnopoetics?"

Rothenberg's moving response is now online--one can tap into the Writers House archives for his reply--but two points in particular stand out: 1) that Paul Blackburn, born the same year as Robert Creeley, "is the equal of Creeley as a poet," 2) and that Paul is something of a "lost poet," one who died young and did not put himself forward as Creeley had done, commenting and serving as spokesman for the Black Mountain School, for example. Paul chose not to align himself, or to allow others to align him with, the Black Mountain School or any other school.

Clayton Eshleman writes of Blackburn, "Many, not just a few, but many poets alive today are beholden to him for a basic artistic kindness, for readings, yes, and for advice, but more humanly for a kind of comradeship that very few poets are willing to give." The readings he organized were the direct progenitors to the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery.

As beneficiary of Paul's generosity, as someone who spent time with him and read (thanks to Paul) at St. Mark's Church on the Bowery, I feel this need to pay my respects... make some long overdue acknowledgment...

Wikipedia's entry on Paul Blackburn notes that he "played an important part in the poetry community, particularly in New York, where he helped fledgling poets develop and provided emotional support and opportunities to read for both unknown and established writers in the various reading series with which he was involved. He organized readings that offered work from the Beats, the New York School, the Deep Image Poets, and the Black Mountain Poets. But he was, let us say, an Independent. A non-aligned poet. Living in New York, organizing readings, etc., he was passionately involved and, like Creeley and others, at the center of the 1960s literary scene. But he was also his own man.

As poetry editor of The Nation he published a wide range of poets and, in the mid-60s, he directed workshops at the Aspen Writers' Conference.

Avatar

2008-04-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

In his book, AVATARS! my friend Bruce Damer defines the term, "Avatars are digital representations of yourself on the Internet that enable you to explore virtual worlds..." J.J. Webb created this particular avatar for use with the animated poetry presentations he's doing with some of my recent work for Blues Cruzio Cafe. "Beau Blue Presents - Contemporary Poetry - Animations"

Poetry Group / Workshop / "It's a Gun"

2008-04-24T16:35:00.000-07:00

Cabrillo College, Aptos, CA - & vocalist Mariah Carey

M. arrives late to class. Keeps his gun out of sight... English 101. I'm trying to do what I can with Strunk & White's Elements of Style.

Later I write something that turns out to be, well, a not very good poem. Yet I can't throw it away. Something about the the personality of the kid, his one good essay, the gun, the incident... keeps me going back. I work and re-work the material. But some scribblings are just that, "scribblings," little more than anecdotes. Here's my little anecdote:

IT'S A GUN

Sara's got on earphones.
I make out Mariah Carey
singing, I want you,
I need you,
don't leave me.

Class begins.
"Okay, Sara," I say,
"tune her out."
Never be alone at night,
if you're lonely, love will be there, Carey sings.

Sara turns it up loud, then takes off the phones.

M n' M, New Yorker,
walks in late,
begins yelling from his seat
at some guy at the door
who's shaking his fists,

but M n' M isn't leaving,
he's staying put, and his friend,
clearly pissed, won't let up. "Mutha..."
waves and yells he's been robbed,
wants his money back,

"Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Uh huh."
What are we on about today? I've got this
lesson plan. I mark the guy late.
"Cool it, cool it..."
I still don't know he's got a gun.

"Let's talk about this outside,"
and the other kid disappears
and M and I step outside
and I tell him to go home.
Actually, he's written this A+ essay

about "murder and bang bang,"
how home was a front stoop in Manhattan,
how he's here for his safety,
how he can't get used to "San-ty Cruz,"
he misses all that bad company.

"Teach," he says, "I'm not goin' home."

Now he's telling me to cool it.
"You don't know what I got," he saying.
He's right. I don't know. Then the police
are all around us; turns out
the room's barricaded. How did I know

Murder and bang bang. Mariah Carey singing
It's a gun, it's a gun.

"It's A Gun" reprinted from CALIFORNIA PART-TIMER, CCFT, AFL-CIO, Fall 1998, Vol. 10, No. 1.

CALIFORNIA PART-TIMER, CCFT, AFL-CIO, Fall 1998, Vol. 10, No. 1 "It's A Gun," poem.
Reprinted in CCFT (Santa Cruz/Monterey) Newsletter, Dec., 1998.

Friends make suggestions and I revise the thing and end up with something less, much less, than what I began with. In fact, I can't even remember what I began with. Only rage at the college for not leveling with me, how I had to learn about what really happened from a local newspaper.

So it's not the student or the gun I wanted to write about, but the way the incident was handled by the college. Murder and bang bang. Anyway, it's the student, it's the student who has the best lines.

* * *

• What does one get out of a poem? What do you take away?

Ezra Pound says, “Only emotion endures...”

and, long-term, what's it all about anyway?

• “God guard me from those thoughts •
men think in the mind alone. •
He that sings a lasting song •
thinks in a marrow bone.”

--W. B. Yeats

James D. Houston, A California Notebook

2008-04-18T17:11:00.000-07:00

The View from Santa Cruz

I've just begun reading Jim Houston's new book, Where Light Takes Its Colors - A California Notebook. Respond immediately to Jim's opening section, The View from Santa Cruz. No surprise. I've lived here since 1985 and have great admiration for Houston and know the locations he conjures up, like Buckhart's candy store, shaped like a Dutch windmill with a Dutch girl on its side...

"The store is called Buckhart's, which might be a Dutch name, except that the long sign over its door features not a girl but an enormous heart, and gazing from within the heart is a well-antlered buck who looks pirated from some Yorkshire hunting lodge. The heart was red once. After the vanes blew down they painted it white. The buck is white. The girl is white. The eight-sided dome is white. Where the morning sun catches it, the dome gleams and leaves an angular flash on my retina when I look away."

But what really gets my attention is Houston's ability to call up the quality of light... "A lot depends on the light here. It shapes the mountains and draws a mossy green from those high meadow patches that never turn brown. Down along the river that runs through town, the light swells up under a cloud of seagulls as they rise in a swirl, between the concrete bridges. They turn, soar, dive like a shower of white sparks and descend again to their marshy, low-tide, inland island. In later afternoon the light turns the bay white. It catches the eucalyptus leaves with their undersides up, like a thousand new moons."

There's more. Much more. I've tried for years to somehow catch the quality of light in (hometown!) Chicago, that bluish-silvery white snowy 4 or 5 o'clock February haze, that cast of light I recall walking home along icy Kimball Avenue from Von Steuben High School. No luck.

Living in Taos, New Mexico, I sought in my writing to catch the quality of light of that place, which I loved. No luck.

In the 1960s, a graduate student at University of Bristol, I studied with the English poet Charles Tomlinson who recommended Adrian Stokes book, The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini, which, like Jim Houston's "Where Light Takes Its Color," does the impossible: to bring alive the quality of light in a particular place and in so doing, to bring alive the place itself.

Stokes has been praised as a writer able “to invoke the material presence of works of art…” to realize that the materials of art “were the actual objects of inspiration… During the Renaissance, Stokes maintained, stone accordingly ‘blossomed’ into sculpture and buildings.”

In Where Light Takes its Color, Jim Houston, like Adrian Stokes, invokes the material presence of works of art and architecture, like the windmill and other Santa Cruz landmarks, to say nothing of the “The sea,” which, “as much as the light, gives this curve of coast its flavor. The light takes its color from the sea, sometimes seems to be emerging from it. And the sea here is ever-present. On clear days it coats the air with a transparent tinge of palest blue that salts and sharpens every detail.”

That’s it.

Rosanne Cash, Leonard Cohen, poetry & song

2008-04-13T17:41:00.000-07:00

1) What comes first, the music or the lyrics?
2) Are Song Lyrics Poetry?

All art aspires to the state of music. May be a cliché, but it’s the truth. And, in the 1940s, before I wrote or published anything, I’d make up songs, awful, by any standard, awful. But songs… and am fascinated by the connection between music, songwriting in particular, and poetry. I interviewed poet-singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen years ago for CBC Radio and was especially interested to hear what he had to say about his origins—as poet, songwriter… [Leonard Cohen interview on my website, www.robertsward.com]

My journals, my blogs, are scrapbooks—among other things—places to keep and, hopefully, organize so I can find what I’m looking for later. Blogs, I find, way better for finding things than paper notebooks. Hundreds and hundreds of paper notebooks. But now I have only to search “Rosanne Cash” or “Leonard Cohen” or (songwriter) “John Stewart”, and I have what I’m looking for.

So, Saturday, April 12, 2008, reading the NY Times… Rosanne Cash in feature titled “Well, Actually, It Is Brain Surgery,” I light on some of her remarks. She begins by saying, “I haven’t written a song in about a year.” And goes on to say of her songwriter mentor John Stewart (”Daydream Believer,” “Gold,” “California Bloodlines”), he used to say to me, upon hearing a new song of mine that he thought might be too perfect or careful or contrived, either lyrically or structurally, 'But where’s the madness, Rose?'

“His belief in songs, and his sense of liberation and expansion when he approached writing, was deeply inspiring. John showed me that songs were the expression of the essential language that all other languages hinged upon. When I first began to know him, I felt that I had been speaking with a vocabulary of 200 words, and in a few months he taught me 10,000 more…”

I like when she says next, “the level of my attention has increased, when I have broken free of chord-progression ruts, when a burst of inspiration propelled me an inch or two forward in my own evolution — but “Dance With the Tiger” was an important moment.

“People always ask me, “What comes first, the music or the lyrics?” I don’t know why people are so fascinated with the answer to that question, and the question always makes me slightly nervous, as if I should have an expert opinion or a backlog of statistics on my own songwriting to give a definitive answer. I can’t…

“Often, it’s true for me that the lyrics come first. I seldom find just melodies on the guitar that come out fully fleshed, and add the lyrics afterward. If I start on the piano, it often happens that the melody will come first, of a piece. The instrument has a lot to do with the order of inspiration. Sometimes. And sometimes the fragment of a conversation, the color of the sky, the image in a dream, has everything to do with where the song begins. My song “Seven Year Ache” began as a long poem, several pages of rambling, and I distilled it down into a lyric. The melody came last.

“On vacation recently, there were some Christian fundamentalists at lunch at the next table and I felt the tension and constriction of their religious beliefs wafting off them like a perfume. That is my own projection, I’m sure, but I thought of something a friend used to say about that particular brand of religion — that it was like “looking at the ground with a flashlight when the whole universe was around you waiting to be noticed.” Walking to the beach later, I was thinking about how my own idea of God was so mutable, and that even though I pray, most of the time I haven’t a clue to whom I’m praying.

“And I like it that way. Sometimes God is Art, Music and Children and that is more than good enough. Ruminating on these things, I thought of a phrase — “the pantheon of my religious desires” — and I wrote it in my notebook. That line is probably too sophomore-English-major precious, but this is how songs begin for me. Sometimes.”

Chico - dog with Mohawk & work in progress

2008-04-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

Chico the dog before Mohawk.

Blog not so much “blog” (on this occasion) as journal entry for handy reference. Exploring the uses of a multi-useful form, i.e., blog. Scarcely writing in my “journal” these days, more and more writing energy—and writing time—going into the blog.

Hence a little scribbling on plane returning from visit to K. (my daughter) in Austin, Texas. How “one woman to another,” how they see what is obvious, how they are tougher, franker, more fun than men, so it seems to me. How and what happens when I don’t need or don’t wish to speak as a father, simply don’t need to be “right,” whatever “right” is. How to listen to a daughter as another woman might listen. So I’ve written this poem, Woman to Woman.

How the woman K. is renting to has a little dog, Chico, who prefers K’s house to her own. Shaved and virtually hairless, little pooch has two-inch eyelashes, white or gray or blonde, and, dear God, I swear it’s true, a Mohawk. Almost hairless, but the dog has a Mohawk.

What crazy person did this to him? I think Chico’s a him. “He’s revolting,” says my daughter’s boyfriend. And the little dog goes into their bedroom at 2 am and knocks his head against the bed and rings its little collar bell to wake her up.

“I’m saying what I’m saying,” I say to my daughter, “and I don’t need to be right.” She’s obsessing about some dope (not the current) she’d be better off without. So I’m working on a poem and the poem has an agenda, but I’m writing what I’m writing, just as I say what I say to my daughter, without the need to be right, without any need at all—other than to convince her to drop the jerk. So the agenda’s up front. But poems or stories with agendas usually stink. The agenda gets in the way of the poem.

Am I, like Chico the dog, knocking my head against some solid object and doing so in vain? Still, the little bell is ringing, Wake Up Wake Up…

FAA let airline slide - Watch Dog Wanted!

2008-04-08T17:44:00.000-07:00

Southwest Airlines to AUSTIN, TEXAS - visiting family

DAY #1 - April 4 - Austin American Statesman, headline
"Staff: FAA let airline slide - Inspectors say supervisors ignored Southwest's problems. (this story first appeared in the NY Times)

"WASHINGTON--Veteran Federal Aviation Administrator inspectors told lawmakers on Thursday that their agency supervisors looked the other way while Southwest Airlines neglected to inspect planes as required and continued to fly them even after discovering cracks in some of them...

"The inspectors said that their FAA supervisors knew of the issues but had discouraged them from pursuing the safety problems or addressing problems within the agency, even threatening to relieve them of their duties...

[meanwhile] "...Southwest Chairman Herb Kelleher defended his airline's safety practices, noting Southwest has never killed any of its passengers." (Note: I am quoting the Austin American Statesman story word for word...)

Then, April 7, I board another Southwest Airlines flight and the plane is full, every seat occupied. How bad would the report have to be for us--myself included--to simply rent a car and take that chance and the additional chance that the bridges and highways, i.e., the fucking infra structure is still in order?

We do what we must... whatever works... for flying, I've taken to using Bach Rescue Remedy Spray, a "Natural Stress Relief, Discreet Mouth Spray..." which includes Rock Rose, said to "add courage and presence of mind in the face of terror or extreme fear." And here I am safely home working on my blog.

My Poet Father - by Hannah Sward

2008-03-29T16:52:00.000-07:00

Daughter Hannah with Anthony... Los Angeles...

Editing an ongoing series of essays on Literary Friendship, "Writers Friendship, Writers Enmity," for Web Del Sol / Perihelion (James Houston on Raymond Carver; Lola Haskins; Tony Barnstone...) thought, with some trepidation, I'd invite my daughter Hannah to contribute her thoughts on what it was like having as father... a writer... so, expanding the scope of "Writers Friendship" from what it's like for one writer to sustain a friendship with another, say, to sustaining a relationship with a family member, a daughter no less, who is herself a writer--and a good one!

Okay, here we go...

"My Poet Father," she writes (and I'm including Hannah's essay with her permission):

"The first sounds I remember are of an Olympia portable typewriter. My father clicking away. To this day, I find myself comforted by that sound.

Me, two years old, falling asleep to the rhythm, the vibrations of his voice as he recited his poems at poetry readings, half asleep in a papoose on my father’s back. I remember the vibration of my father’s voice as he recited …

I have many feelings about growing up the daughter of a poet. I cannot separate my father from the poet, the poet from my father. I envy his life. I want my life to be just as interesting. The stories my mother has shared with me of all the young women fawning over my father, coming over to our house, one by one going up to his study in our big old Victorian house in Oak Bay, Victoria, British Columbia. The stories my father himself has told me. Arriving late to a reading he was giving at The Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Only hours earlier having been hit by a car. Still bleeding from the head, bandaged, dizzy, (briefly) an amnesiac, he arrives to read, auditorium filled with starry eyed students –

My father the poet, his life rich with stories I have both lived and not lived, he is my hero. I romanticize his life and the life I have lived growing up with him. The frequent visits to Earle Birney’s home with his much younger, beautiful wife in Toronto. My first meeting with Margaret Atwood, she hovering over me like a medicine woman as I lay sick in my red, wrought iron bed on Algonquin Island (Toronto Island) in the cold of winter. Or, his CBC radio interview in Montreal with Leonard Cohen in the early eighties.

“Why can’t I go, dad?” I ask. “Why can’t I go with you to meet Leonard?”

Growing up there were many places I wanted to go with my father. There’s a line in one of his poems,

*NIGHTGOWN, WIFE'S GOWN

"Where do people go when they go to sleep? /

I envy them. I want to go there too. /

I am outside of them, married to them. /

Nightgown, wife's gown, women that you look at, /

Beside them--I knock on their shoulder blades, /

Ask to be let in. It is forbidden. /

But you’re my wife, I say. There is no reply. /

Arms around her, I caress her wings."

And I, as a child, and later as the adult, I knock on his shoulder blades, ask to be let in... "But you’re my father," I say. This is the life I wanted to avoid. Now I find myself living it. Even as a kid, the life of a writer is too painful, too lonely. But at the same time many lives in one. The life of a poet’s daughter is at once rich, but it is also lonely. The dreamer, the drifter, the life of a poet, the life of poet’s daughter . . .

___
*first published in The Paris Review... reprinted in dad's Collected Poems.

What is a blog? Ars Poetica and the art of the blog

2008-03-27T16:34:00.000-07:00

What is a blog?

Ars Poetica (also known as "The Art of Poetry," Epistula Ad Pisones...) was a treatise on poetics translated into English by Ben Jonson. How does Ars Poetica (aka Arse Poetica) apply to blog? There's an art to poetry. Is there an art to blogging? Just because you make it up as you go along doesn't mean there's not an art to it.

1. "In media res," or into the middle of things... a popular narrative technique that appears in ancient epics and remains popular to this day, says Wikipedia. Okay. And what is a blog if not an example of "in media res"? It's where you begin... is the beginning where you begin? or where you begin to begin? Blogging I'm thinking is beginning to begin... but of course in your mind you've already begun. Something's going on... even if not directly related to your "beginning to begin..."

2. "Make it new," the poet Ezra Pound said. Yeah, okay... not as easy as it sounds!

3. "bonus dormitat Homerus" or "even Homer nods." Homer the poet, not Homer Simpson. In truth, we're none of us awake. Poets fuck up. Bloggers fuck up. Have a little humility. Have a little compassion. Gimme a break. Give yourself a break.

4. And some continuity. Poems, if not blogs, gotta have some continuity. Yes? No?

5. Then there's "ut pictura poesis", or "As is painting so is poetry", by which Horace (so says Wikipedia) meant that poetry (in its widest sense, "imaginative texts") merited the same careful interpretation that was, in Horace's day, reserved for painting. So that's where I'm coming from, writing / blogging as if someone would not only read it, but read it with some care. This at a time when most of us are just "window-shopping," cruising from Ramayana and Blog Wild! to Raining Noodles or I Blame the Patriarchy or Smoking Gun or or... I think unless you have attention deficit disorder you're going to have trouble keeping up. Sorry. Am I allowed to say that?

6. Then, understand, the Art of Poetry involves "decorum," using appropriate vocabulary and diction in each style of writing.

So now I'm not sure this even works. For myself, I'm into the messiness and ephemerality, I can cruise, I can window-shop Web / blogs without holding my nose. I'm most inclined to wince when I read my own jottings, own tendency to nod, to be a senior dude older than John McCain.

And one day I'll actually check out the Internet Archive project, Way-back Machine (www.archive.org/web/web.php) that lets you travel back in Web time... I don't know enough. I'm just trying this thing out.

Ultimate Blogs, Masterworks From the Wild Web

2008-03-27T15:40:00.000-07:00

So I'm reading David Kamp's review of Ultimate Blogs, Masterworks From the Wild Web -- NY Times Book Review, 3/23/08. I'm more addicted than ever to blog blog blog. But I'll never have it down, never make it as an Ultimate Blogger. Too old, too unable to write "good bloggy prose," too unable to write without at least a _little_ editing. Though best poems, Uncle Dog and some others, were written in just this way, flash flash, bang bang... then fuss with the punctuation. Just did it. Did it and done. On to the next. Even as a journalist (Toronto Star, Globe & Mail), I wasn't really a reporter. I was a book reviewer, a feature writer, which suited me fine. I got to think, I got to have conversations with people, read books, do a little research... edit edit edit... A real reporter would just do it, fast fast fast... and on to the next... so blogging, I think is more like that, "reporting," though one is essentially reporting on oneself, using the Web to do the equivalent (ha!) of what diarist Samuel Pepys was doing in England a couple centuries ago. Writing about himself, what he observed, the good and the bad, the city (London), the times, the daily daily doings...

But I'm not "conversational and restless," well, maybe... yeah, but "reckless"? Reckless in what sense? He'll say anything. Someone who takes pleasure in surprising himself. Kamp the reviewer speaks of "chin-strokers," big time serious folks like Nobel economist Gary Becker and federal circuit judge Richard Posner, who share a blog "in which they bat serious issues back and forth..." others, I'm discovering, create alt-comix blogs whose work appears in panel form.

Now I've started this thing, something wells up, once, twice a week, and giving way to the urge, I scribble notes onto "Blogger.com/post-create". In truth, I'm writing more blog these days than poetry. Why and why not does something have to be a poem?

Poetry. "I too dislike it," says poet Marianne Moore in a poem titled Poetry. What she mainly dislikes is the phoniness, the not real, the bullshit... but still, she says, there's a place for it. So while I want an audience, I'm used to _not_ having readers for my poetry and these days am adapting to the idea of _not_ having readers for my blog. Spent half a century, I'm that fucking old! keeping up a journal that I never thought to inflict on anyone. What did I get out of it? I dunno. A poem or two. And I think of all those boxes, all those notebooks, scribble scribble scribble, at Washington University in St. Louis, my little archive. At least it's there and not under my desk or in a closet somewhere. Boxes and boxes and boxes. We're talking 50, 60, 70... lots and lots of boxes.

Must somehow enjoy it, blogging, because I'm using the time that might go into adding a counter to my blog, to blog... the blogging is taking priority... why put 20, 30 minutes into adding a counter when I can put 20, 30 minutes into writing the damn thing? And I don't even want to know if anyone is reading it. You're reading it. So add a comment, okay?

From what Sarah Boxer says in Ultimate Blog I guess what you want is people to comment. That's the sign of success, that's what counts for Big Time Bloggers... so far the only people who comment on my little strand of a strand of a strand are friends and family. Enough.

Uncle Dog: The Poet at 9 (revisited)

2008-03-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

Kai is serving here as place holder. He has the attitude and manner of famed Uncle Dog, though not the "mongrelness" of that legendary animal, a nine-year-old's vision of a Chicago garbage man's dog.

Uncle Dog was the first animal I ever saw who seemed to have some sense of purpose, dignity, pride, and self-regard. Fuck the human species. This Heinz 57 mutt refused to cringe or bark, or in any way even acknowledge other dogs. ‘Uncle Dog.’ He was the one who rode around with the once-weekly garbage man. This was Chicago back in the mid-1940s, and we lived on the second floor of a two-flat apartment. Rent: $65. a month. And the best of it was our back porch where I hung out with animals. But never my favorite, the garbage man's dog, dog of dogs!

I think of him now in our age of "companion animals," "designer dogs," a time when 69 million American households have dogs--73.9 million dogs! Dogs. Dogs. 39 billion dollars a year goes for the care and feeding of American pets.

Anyway, more than any family member or school teacher or, for that matter, yoga instructor... it was Uncle Dog who taught me the importance of carriage and self-regard. Self-respect. We’d gotten dogs from that notorious Cook County prison (c. 1940), the Chicago Humane Society and, no fault of their own, those canines were a sorry lot. Three hungry days in a cage and, broken-spirited... either they were“selected” by some dog-lover or were gassed. That's where we got some real "suspects," canines picked up off the street... dogs without street smarts, dogs... victims of human self-regard, "human exceptionalism."

Uncle Dog. The mongrel prince of princes. Dog of dogs.

In 1957 at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop I wrote the thing. And, surprise! it got accepted by the Chicago Review. Then the Chicago Review Anthology, then Hayden Carruth’s The Voice That is Great Within Us, and some others. And, needing publication to nourish my ego, to do for me whatever needed doing... I draw inspiration from...

I can hear him now: Woof, woof! Woof fuckin' woof!

Woe Be Gone, Melancholics Against Happiness

2008-03-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

I'm a fan of Garrison Keillor and, what's this? A New York Times (Sun., Mar. 16, 2008) book review of Against Happiness, In Praise of Melancholy, by Eric G. Wilson. The reviewer? Garrison Keillor. Given the subject of this blog, "Dr. Sward's Cure for Melancholia," I couldn't help but read what Keillor had to say.

"...Wilson clarifies his opposition to anti-depressants later. He is not opposed to them in the case of severe depression, only in the case of mild to moderate depression. All right. Thanks for that. The distinction between melancholia (good) and depression (bad), Wilson writes, is simple: depression is passive, melancholia is turbulent. Defending depression of any sort on the ground that Beethoven suffered from it is awfully close to defending tuberculosis on the grounds that it sharpened John Keats' vision or arguing that you shouldn't clean up violent, drug-ridden neighborhoods because so many brilliant jazzmen came from there. And look at the long list of gin-soaked writers--practically the whole pantheon of the 20th century...

"To argue for melancholia as a force for creativity prompts the question, Why isn't this a better book, since the author is so miserable. And a Minnesotan reading Wilson, a North Carolinan on the tonic effect of melancholy winter has to smile."

In short, Against Happiness is "a good old-fashioned broadside against American optimism--the mass of men lead lives of shallow happiness, the superior man exults in his gloom."

All I know, speaking personally, is that gloom begets gloom. And the title, "Woe Be Gone," is more than clever. Lake Wobegon. It's also a little prayer. This review reads like a charm, a charm against the gloom... O gloom, O melancholy, O Woe... Be Gone!

Ellen Bass, The Human Line

2008-03-13T14:21:00.000-07:00

Interviewing poet Ellen Bass for Bay Area publication, the wonderful and amazing Poetry Flash... coverage of the West Coast poetry scene, circulation 20,000. PF edited by Joyce Jenkins and Richard Silberg, both unusually generous poets, i.e., open to other peoples' work... generosity of spirit is a gift, a grace not always present in the people who make up "the little world of poetry." I'd include in that number, the "generous and gifted," our Santa Cruz neighbor, our friend Ellen Bass. She's listened to and critiqued my work, and I'd count her among my mentors. So it is I chose to interview her, so it is I hold in my hand The Human Line, her sixth collection of poetry, one praised by Billy Collins as "frighteningly personal poems about sex, love, birth, motherhood, and aging..."

As a writer, I sometimes ponder the workings of The Imagination, whatever that is. As more and more of what I see of the world strikes me as surreal, as the surreal, in a sense, has begun to seem so "ordinary..." I sometimes wish to employ my imagination as a way of calming down, of steadying the whirling of just about everything. I once took pleasure in the fever of imagining. Now I take pleasure in imagining the world (nature, politics, people...) as, well, a little more stable, and that's not the right word either. I sometimes think the only imagination you need is the ability to witness things "as they are," to record, honestly and accurately, that most run-of-the-mill, the most every day / mundane... just as it appears. That, at some level, that's all the imagination you need. In short, you don't need to smoke and drink and hallucinate... you only need to see and have achieved some mastery of your craft (as writer or painter...) to do justice to your calling.

There's nothing less believable than reality, but made up stories generally make sense.

That's what I think today.

Saying this badly, I suppose, but in reading Ellen Bass's "Sleeping in My Mother's Bed," the opening poem in The Human Line,

Those lines,

"...I lie in her bed
like a fork on a folded napkin,
perfectly still and alone..."

I'm moved by the poem, moved by those lines and, for myself, have no answer to the question: What is the line, if any, between such description and metaphor? And I think one reason I am moved by this poem, and those lines, is they're so utterly natural, utterly believable... I see what the poet is saying... there's an immediate impact certain lines have, certain poems... I sometimes call it "the ring of truth." Ellen's book, The Human Line, has about it... from beginning to end, "the ring of truth."

Another sample:

Sleeping With You

Is there anything more wonderful?
After we have floundered
through our separate pain

we come to this. I bind myself to you,
like otters wrapped in kelp, so the current
will not steal us as we sleep.

Through the night we turn together,
rocked in the shallow surf,
pebbles polished by the sea.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2002

William Buckley, Sidelight--Liberal?

2008-03-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

William Buckley with Ronald Reagan.

Yeah, I’m older than John McCain. And some say he’s older than dirt. Doctor asked today if I felt a 72-year-old like John McCain would be up to handling the Presidency. Physically, mentally... I'm no Republican (our doctor is) but I said, "Sure, but our vote goes for Obama." Doctor said, "I'm a Republican, but I'm leaning toward Obama..."

Anyway, we're talking here about a man called Buckley. In fact, two men... two Buckley's.

In 1959 I was a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, walking distance from Robert Frost’s home. Frost was very much alive at the time and lectured and read from his poems at the Conference.

As a *waiter I was assigned a roommate, a non-waiter named Reid Buckley, younger brother of William Buckley. Chicago-born, fresh out of the Navy (Korean War vet on G.I. Bill), ill-educated, first trip to New England, raw, naïve, I had never heard of older brother William Buckley, author of God and Man at Yale (1951).

Still, I found Reid warm, friendly, a wonderful conversationalist and, well, educated...

Reid, I recall, was interested in what I had to say about my “studies” in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and we exchanged samples of one another’s work, his prose for my poetry. I had never met a self-declared “conservative.” Until I met Reid I had no idea what a conservative was. And the man, I learned later, was an aristocrat. Home-schooled with tutors. Independently wealthy. We could not have been more unalike.

As a conservative Reid argued that nothing genuinely new was likely to be produced in fiction or poetry. He himself was working on what he called a gothic novel. Because nothing new could be written, because it had all already been done, one might as well, Reid argued, write within a given tradition. If you wrote, or read, a gothic novel you knew where you were. Likely a castle, an old castle, maybe abandoned; the work would be pervaded by some mystery or fear; there might be women in distress, lonely women, pensive and oppressed... he seemed disappointed to see I wasn't following "the models," that I wasn't employing rhyme and meter.

For my part, inspired by Walt Whitman, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg and e.e. cummings, I was writing free verse. Good, bad or indifferent, I felt my work was, well, original... so, I recall, I was as much a puzzlement to Reid Buckley as he was to me. But I liked the guy and, as roommates go, I counted myself lucky.

In the fall of 1959 (I think I have the date right), I returned to Iowa City and the poetry workshop. And Reid and I corresponded. For a while. Then I made a fatal blunder. I mentioned my intention to vote for John F. Kennedy and made it clear I was a Democrat, a liberal.

That was it. Reid responded by saying he could no longer carry on a correspondence with me. A liberal? He had nothing further to say. So now, more than half a century later, the country more divided than ever, I think of that curiously innocent time. Though is any time ever innocent? And the oddness, so it seemed to me, that one’s political beliefs could so infect one’s aesthetic outlook... and one’s writing... That, in fact, if I believed as Reid believed that “nothing new could be written...” I’d have stopped right then and there. I was the first-generation American middle class graduate of a state University, one who, c. 1959, struck out for the New Territory (Iowa and points west). Reid, as I saw it, was the quintessential Easterner... tradition-bound, cautious, Establishment.

T.S. Eliot was the only model I had for a “conservative.” Eliot wasn't exactly born to it, but he took specific steps in his self-definition. He converted to Anglicanism, dropped his American citizenship and became a British subject. In the preface to his book, For Lancelot Andrewes, Eliot wrote "the general point of view [of the book's essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion."

But Eliot, I argued, also wrote those extraordinarily original works, Prufrock, The Wasteland... he may have been a conservative, but he was also an innovator. Yes, I read and re-read Tradition and the Individual Talent.

And as for Liberal, I think of my aunt Leah who, in Poltava, Russia, endured successive pogroms. She used the term “liberal” to describe Czar’s who did not encourage or indulge in pogroms. There were czars, tolerant “liberals,” who did not go in for pogroms. A liberal, I came to understand from Aunt Leah, was someone who maintained a live and let live attitude.

That pretty much defined my understanding of what it meant to be liberal, people who thought for themselves.

And William Buckley, to his credit, was that kind of conservative, someone who argued for tolerance, who sought to restrain, for example, others all too willing to have given vent to their prejudices. So, in that sense, William Buckley--in Aunt Leah's eyes--would have qualified as a liberal. God bless William Buckley!

----
*Novelist and NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse was a fellow waiter that year at Bread Loaf. Alan has remained a friend.

Heart, Aphrodite, Valentine, Buttocks

2008-02-28T16:08:00.000-08:00

My friend, the Urban Dictionary

This post comes courtesy the Urban Dictionary. When I'm feelin' blue, as I am now following a three-day, time-wasting disaster with the NEA $25,000. Creative Writing Fellowship debacle--three days trying unsuccessfully to download the application form--I turn not to drink but to the (online) Urban Dictionary. Solace. The heart went out of me. I lost heart. I gave up. What did I lose actually? My heart. My fucking heart. So, Urban Dictionary to the rest-cue, sorry, rescue!

The weekend's coming up and I want my heart back.

Heart: "The familiar double-lobed heart symbol seen on Valentine's Day cards and candy was inspired by the shape of the human female buttocks as seen from the rear. The twin lobes of the stylized version correspond roughly to the paired auricles and ventricles (chambers) of the anatomical heart... The ancient Greeks and Romans originated the link between human female anatomy and the heart shape. The Greeks associated beauty with the curves of the human female behind. The Greek goddess of beauty, Aphrodite, was beautiful all over, but was unique in that her buttocks were especially beautiful. Her shapely rounded hemispheres were so appreciated by the Greeks that they built a special temple Aphrodite Kallipygos, which literally meant, 'Goddess with the Beautiful Buttocks.' This was probably the only religious building in the world that was dedicated to buttock worship... Valentine's Day-type heart symbols first became popular in 15th Century Europe as a suit designation on playing cards. It is possible that the Renaissance fondness for classical literature and history brought forth the Greek interest in the female buttocks shape, which also mirrors the basic outline of female breasts."

And when I turned 60, I turned to Strunk & White's Elements of Style... see "Turning 60," p.213-214, The Collected Poems, Black Moss Press. I'm a fucking retired English teacher. What else would I do?

NEA $25,000. Creative Writing Fellowship

2008-02-27T10:53:00.000-08:00

Funding Opportunity Number, 2008NEA03LFCW

Funding Opportunity Number, 2008NEA03LFCW

"Before you apply through Grants.gov for the first time," says the NEA Application Calendar, "you must be registered. Register with Grants.gov:

* It is a multi-step process.
* Takes time; allow a few days.
* Must be completed before you can submit your application."

This year it wasn't simply a matter of not getting the grant (which is usually the case, though I've had some good luck in the past), but of trying and trying, and not even getting the application. Three days on the computer, locating the Funding Opportunity Number, 2008NEA03LFCW, downloading latest Adobe Reader and other software to "read" the application (pot of gold at end of rainbow), getting e-Authentication User ID, returning to the Grants.gov website, selecting "Home," going back to the ORC eAuthentication main page, selecting the blue "Credential Check" button, entering the User ID and password. Then my password gets rejected, then my User name gets rejected, then I start the process all over again... then my Safari browser crashes...

Back to the ORC e-authentication help desk... four hours, five hours... and I've written software user manuals for a living, I thought I knew how to do this stuff. Grow fascinated with the stupefying process, forget even why I'm doing it... more and more investment of time, figure "I can't quit now..."

I imagine Franz Kafka putting in for a writing fellowship... Kafka at Grants.gov... I call my friend David, more skillful and versatile with handling himself online... He too is stymied, but knows another person, a fellow poet, who has managed to download and complete the application.

"You're 74 years old," says my wife. "They're not going to give it to you anyway. They want younger people."

"But if it's this hard to get an application," I say, "the odds are fewer people will apply. Therefore, I'll have a better chance."

NEA Day 3 - she brews an espresso, suggests phoning for hard copy application, which I do. Get directed, then re-directed back to the very place on the website where I've spent all these hours... "Look, sir, they're no longer providing hard copy application forms," says a lady on the other end of the line.

Back to work. And I have just the poem, "Woof Fuckin' Woof," one of the new ones I've been seeking to set aside time to complete.

Poetry Workshop(s) #2, Professionalization

2008-02-24T00:17:00.000-08:00

With Roy Mash, Events Coordinator
for Marin Poetry Center.

The Professionalization of Poetry - Thurs., Feb. 21, 7:30 PM - Falkirk Cultural Center, San Rafael.
Panelists include Becky Foust (above), David Alpaugh (top right) and myself.

Given the topic, The Professionalization of Poetry, David Alpaugh begins by turning to Wikipedia for a definition of Professionalization:

"Professionalization is the social process by which any trade or occupation transforms itself into a true 'profession of the highest integrity and competence.' This process tends to involve establishing acceptable qualifications, a professional body or association to oversee the conduct of members of the profession and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs. This creates 'a hierarchical divide between the knowledge-authorities in the professions and a deferential citizenry.' This demarcation is often termed 'occupational closure', as it means that the profession then becomes closed to entry from outsiders, amateurs and the unqualified: a stratified occupation 'defined by professional demarcation and grade.' The origin of this process is said to have been with guilds during the Middle Ages, when they fought for exclusive rights to practice their trades as journeymen, and to engage unpaid apprentices.

"Professions also possess power, prestige, high income, high status and privileges; their members soon come to comprise an elite class of people, cut off to some extent from the common people, and occupying an elevated station in society: 'a narrow elite...a hierarchical social system: a system of ranked orders and classes.'
The professionalization process tends to establish the group norms of conduct and qualification of members of a profession and tends also to insist that members of the profession achieve 'conformity to the norm' and abide more or less strictly with the established procedures and any agreed code of conduct, which is policed by professional bodies, for 'accreditation assures conformity to general expectations of the profession.'

[from Wikipedia]

- Someone at the Poetry Center later commented on our panel, "Rebecca Foust was thorough in her objections and rebuttals (like the lawyer that she is); Robert Sward gave a sweet, scruffy flavor to the event as someone who's been around the poetry scene for 50 years..." okay, but still trying to figure out what "scruffy" means... physical appearance? Presentation?

- The crux of the matter is this, that writing workshops end up teaching poets to write poems that will pass muster in the workshop, the little "hot house..." writing poems to please the other students. More than anything else... it's insecurity, that's a constant in every workshop I've sat in on, taught, been a student in... too often that's the emotion than overrides all others... so, out of fear, so it seems to me, people too often are too willing to write to please. Love me, love my poem. Love me, love my poem.

- For me, the best thing about the three years I spent in Iowa City – I was later invited back to teach -
was the importance of poetry... that there wasn’t a day when I wasn’t writing or somehow interacting with others who were doing the same. And I had plenty of insecurity. I just didn't sign on to the prevailing aesthetic, Brooks & Warren, John Crowe Ransom, the New Criticism... this was half a century ago. Shit!

- I’m old enough (older than John McCain!) to have heard Robert Frost at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (c. 1960) say calling oneself a poet was a form of arrogance. Frost said a seat companion on a train once asked him what he did for a living. Frost answered saying he was a farmer.

- Never call yourself a poet, he said. That’s for other people to do. One has to earn the designation. You’re a poet for other reasons than the fact you've earned an MFA.

- But what do I know? I’ve been writing and publishing since 1957... I have doubts... I know at some level I haven't changed since I began scribbling aboard LST 914 during the Korean War. I'm a wannabe. Wannabe. Wannabe. Wannabe. Fine. I don't give a fuck. As long as I can go on writing.

[more to come...]

------

David Alpaugh’s essay “The Professionalization of Poetry” was serialized in the Jan/Feb and March/April 2003 issues of Poets & Writers Magazine and drew hundreds of emails and wide discussion on the Internet. Alpaugh's fiction, drama, and criticism have appeared in more than a hundred literary journals and anthologies. His first collection, Counterpoint, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press, and his chapbooks have been published by Coracle Books and Pudding House. One of the Bay Area's most popular featured readers, he has taught at the University of California Berkeley Extension and hosts a monthly reading series at Valona Delicatessen in Crockett. His second collection Heavy Lifting appeared earlier this year from Alehouse Press. "The Professionalization of Poetry" is available on-line at Huston Poetry Review.

Rebecca Foust, a former activist and grassroots political organizer for students with learning disorders, is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry in Warren Wilson’s low residency program. Her book about raising a son with Asperger’s Syndrome, Dark Card, won the 2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Award (Texas Review Press), and her full length manuscript was a finalist in three national book competitions, including Poetry’s 2007 Emily Dickinson First Book Award. Also in 2007, Foust’s poetry won two Pushcart nominations and several other awards and distinctions, appearing in Atlanta Review, JAMA, Margie, 2007 Marin Poetry Center Anthology, North American Review, Nimrod International Journal and many other reviews.
www.rebeccafoust.com

Robert Sward has taught at Cornell University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and UC Santa Cruz. A Fulbright scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. His many books include "Four Incarnations" (Coffee House Press); "Heavenly Sex," "The Collected Poems," and "God is in the Cracks" (Black Moss Press). "The Collected" and "God is in the Cracks" are now in their second printing.
www.robertsward.com

Art & History of China, MAH - Feb. 23 - June 29

2008-02-23T22:59:00.000-08:00

Museum of Art & History
@ the McPherson Center
705 Front Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
-
831.429.1964
www.santacruzmah.org

Museum Wide Exhibition: *Ying: Inspired by the Art and History of China,
February 23 – June 29, 2008

Just returned from opening / reception and dinner-banquet at Italian restaurant with local and visiting artists from China, including Yao Chong-wei, Standing Deputy-director of Chengde Art Academy, and Huo Weing Ging / Liuaimin, Member of China's National Photographer's Association. They're the ones I spoke with--through an interpreter.

Images above include 1) "Man Smoking Pipe (Ancestral painting), Qing Dynasty, official poster for the exhibit, 2) Gloria Alford's "The Jaded Princess," and 3) Yao Chong-wei with photographer and "Successful calligraphy and painting person " Huo Weing Ging / Liuaimin... the opening for the show draws hundreds of people...

Museum's Executive Director, Paul Figueroa, speaks of the "breath-taking impact" of Gloria's "Jaded Princess," which, "as a replica of an historical artifact transferred to the contemporary immediately sets the 'tone' for the gallery."

According to the museum's website, "the third-floor features Santa Cruz artists inspired by the art and history of China. The featured artists include Gloria Alford, Wallace Boss, Dana Eaton, Sara Friedlander, Coeleen Kiebert, Mattie Leeds, Joel Magen, Victoria May and Gary Snider." Find myself particularly struck (anew!) by G's "Jaded Princess," Sara Friedlander's photographs, Coeleen Kiebert's sculptural pieces and Mattie Leeds, a potter whose work has to be seen to be believed. Trying to find a link to Mattie's work.

One work in the show sets forth the Six Principles of Chinese painting

The Six principles of Chinese painting were established by Xie He (also known as Hsieh Ho), a writer, art historian and critic in 6th century China. He is most famous for his "Six points to consider when judging a painting" (绘画六法, Pinyin:Huìhuà Liùfǎ), taken from the preface to hsRecord of the Classification of Old Painters (古画品录; Pinyin: Gǔhuà Pǐnlù). Keep in mind that this was written circa 550 A.D. and refers to "old" and "ancient" practices.

The six elements that define a painting are:
1) "Spirit Resonance," or vitality, and seems to translate to the nervous energy transmitted from the artist into the work. The overall energy of a work of art. Xie He said that without Spirit Resonance, there was no need to look further.

2) "Bone Method," or the way of using the brush. This refers not only to texture and brush stroke, but to the close link between handwriting and personality. In his day, the art of calligraphy was inseparable from painting.

3) "Correspondence to the Object," or the depicting of form, which would include shape and line.

4) "Suitability to Type," or the application of color, including layers, value and tone.

5) "Division and Planning," or placing and arrangement, corresponding to composition, space and depth.

6) "Transmission by Copying," or the copying of models, not only from life but also the works of antiquity.

[from Wikipedia]
--

Background:
*In 2006, Susan Hillhouse, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections, was invited to China to lecture and curate exhibitions in both Qufu and Chengde. While in Chengde, she visited the studios of a group of artists. The concept of this exhibition resulted from her insightful visit and blends with our goal to intersect art and history. The influence of China on California’s historical landscape is an integral part of this region’s history. This museum wide presentation opens a new path of discovery through contemporary artists from China, the Bay area and Santa Cruz deepening our understanding of Santa Cruz County’s many cultural heritages."

Do poetry workshops do anyone any good? Iowa...

2008-02-19T14:51:00.000-08:00

(University of Iowa campus, Iowa City)

Are MFA Programs Killing Poetry? Do poetry workshops do anyone any good?

Serving on a panel, The Professionalization of Poetry, with David Alpaugh, drawing on David’s essays in the Jan/Feb and Mar/April 2003 issues of Poets & Writers Magazine. Others on our panel include Michelle Bitting, MFA candidate at Pacific University, Oregon; and Rebecca Foust, winner of two Pushcart nominations.

Marin Poetry Center, Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission, San Rafael, CA. Thurs., 7:30 PM, Feb. 21.

Topics for panelists:

1. Do poetry workshops do anyone any good?
2. Are MFA programs killing poetry? 
3. Would those who choose poetry as a "career path" benefit by getting a "real job"? 
4. Is the poetry publishing scene a scam? 

Starting with #1, the answer is, Yes... for me personally. Why? Well, need to back up for a moment.

I began writing while serving in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. A landing ship (LST 914, too small to warrant a name), large as a football field, lots of space, lots of privacy, lots of time to wander around in our bare feet... very casual duty... early 50s, McCarthy era, but we were something of a hippie ship, so, with access to a typewriter, a library (I was ship’s librarian), I got to read (Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, Melville, Carl Sandburg) and write.

I was 18, just of high school, and thought what I wrote deserved a larger audience. At the very least I wanted feedback from other writers, teachers, perhaps an editor... I had never seen a poetry magazine, had no idea there was such a thing, though I’d grown up in Chicago, home of Poetry. Our little ship had a subscription to Time Magazine and that’s the one magazine I read and that’s where I sent my first packet of poems. A playful editor responded with a rejection note in rhyming couplets. I took this as encouragement and, in truth, am still pro-Time.

My first experience with a poetry workshop was at the University of Iowa, which I attended with the G.I. Bill and a fellowship, courtesy Paul Engle, the Director. Engle had taken over from Karl Seashore who, as David Alpaugh notes in his essay, helped start the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1936-- ).

John Berryman and Robert Lowell had taught there shortly before I arrived. W.D. Snodgrass, a graduate, had won the Pulitzer Prize for Heart’s Needle. Philip Levine, Donald Justice, Robert Mezey, Henri Coulette... they were the ones who sat in judgment on the poems presented and set the standard which, at that time (1956-58), was formal formal formal.

In my poem “Iowa Writers’ Workshop—1958” (Collected Poems, p. 76-77) I refer to them as "the four crows."

“...Ours is an age of light. Our crows*
Reflect the age, Eisenhower-Nixon
Colored stripes, rainbow solids, blacks & whites.

"Ruffling their wings, Mezey, Coulette, Levine
Refuse to vote. [i.e., comment on a poem under discussion]

“Page four, 'Apologies to William S.'
Apologies, our third sonnet...”
And those who teach, who write
And teach, the man at hand, apologize
For themselves, and themselves at hand.

[later – same poem]

“...One has written
Nothing new, and it is inconceivable
That one would, or will ever write again.

“...Page one. Walled-in glances at the author.
And then the author disappears,
The poem anonymous.
Voice. Voices. There are voices about it:
Anonymous. The self. A sonnet’s self...

“The room is filled with it. It is a bird.
It sits beside us and extends
Its wings. Mezey hits it with his elbow.
The bird shrieks and sprawls
Upon the floor. We surrender

"We surrender to its death. The poem breathes,
Becomes its author and departs.
We all depart. And watch
The green walls take our seats. Apologies.
Brooks & Warren. DuPont. Edsel & Ford.”
---

The four *crows? At the time (c. 1958) I was researching and writing poems about birds, "The Apteryx," "The Dodo..." as for the crow, one has only to turn to Wikipedia...

"Corvids and man

"Certain species have been considered pests; the Common Raven, Australian Raven and Carrion Crow have all been known to kill weak lambs as well as eating freshly dead corpses probably killed by other means...

"Crows make a wide variety of calls or vocalizations. Whether the crows' system of communication constitutes a language is a topic of debate... Crows have also been observed to respond to calls of other species; this behavior is presumably learned because it varies regionally. Crows' vocalizations are complex and poorly understood. Some of the many vocalizations that crows make are a "caw", usually echoed back and forth between birds, a series of "caws" in discrete units, counting out numbers, [sounds like poetry to me!] a long caw followed by a series of short caws (usually made when a bird takes off from a perch), an echo-like "eh-aw" sound... These vocalizations vary by species, and within each species vary regionally. In many species, the pattern and number of the numerical vocalizations have been observed to change in response to events in the surroundings (i.e. arrival or departure of [other] crows).

"As a group, the crows show remarkable examples of intelligence, and Aesop's fables of The Crow and the Pitcher shows that humans have long viewed the crow as an intelligent animal. Crows and ravens often score very highly on intelligence tests. Certain species top the avian IQ scale. Crows in the northwestern U.S. show modest linguistic capabilities and the ability to relay information over great distances, live in complex, hierarchic societies involving hundreds of individuals with various "occupations", and have an intense rivalry with the area's less socially advanced ravens.

"...Crows will engage in a kind of mid-air jousting, or air-"chicken" to establish pecking order..."

Crows, poetry workshops and pecking order...

I’ve studied in and led poetry workshops since 1956. In fact, in 1968 I happily returned to Iowa to teach. Some of my best friends—and worst enemies—have been poets. The pie is small. The rivalry is huge. And I compete. But it’s not so much the rewards as the fact other people care about writing, that my writing benefits, I find, from association—positive or negative—with other writers.

Crows, poetry workshops and pecking order... I edit a feature for Web Del Sol / Perihelion. It’s called Writers’ Friendship and has to do with the relationship / what it’s like for one writer to sustain a friendship with another. Lola Haskins, a fine poet who teaches Computer Science at the University of Florida writes:

"For example, when I meet some poets, I get the feeling that they’re sizing me up to see if I’m any threat. If the verdict is that I’m not, then they relax. If they decide otherwise, they clam up and start looking over my shoulder for someone more useful to talk to. Sometimes, it goes much farther than this, perhaps even to the point of paranoia. For instance, ...a few years ago, when two poets came to my town to teach in the writing program, I thought, great, more poets, and bought their books. But not only have they not been polite to me--without ever exchanging more than ten words total with me in all the years since they’ve come, they put me down to their students on a regular basis. So why are they doing this? I’ve decided it’s because they’re protecting English, which they see as their territory. It seems such a pity, but I know it’s not an isolated case. I’ve heard other stories like that, where certain writers seem to have peed on their four corners, to make sure interlopers are aware that only they, the purveyors of urine, and their students are welcome within their borders. And if someone tries to cross that line, he or she finds out what that odd odor means and, to mix a metaphor, in spades."

So, back to the original question, Do poetry workshops do anyone any good?

Is there value in hanging out with some of the best teachers and writers in the country? Iowa may have been a mixed blessing for me--in the late 50s with my ragged verse--but it was, overall, very much a blessing. The community of writers, the contagious passion for writing and for poetry itself... overall, speaking for myself, the answer is yes yes yes.

--
David Alpaugh's Professionalization of Poetry
http://www.houstonpoetryreview.net/fall2003_review_001.html

There's Always A Little Darkness, Victoria, B.C.-L.A.

2008-02-14T23:35:00.001-08:00

The last time I got into a punch-throwing fight with someone was in Victoria, B.C. The first time (in Victoria) was with Robin Skelton, a colleague at the University, but that was no contest. That was another country and another story. Around the same time, however, I got into a fight with visual artist Patrick McCarthy. I lost, sonofabitch! That also occurred in Victoria, B.C. A beautiful city but, as they say, there's always a little darkness. I've been privileged to live in several Edens, San Miguel de Allende; Taos, New Mexico; Victoria, B.C.; Santa Cruz... Edens all, but each with their share of darkness. Time out... excuse me. Brief tangent: What have I learned in this life? 1) There's always a little darkness; 2) seven-eighths of everything is invisible; 3) children and money, children and money... and in that order, that's what's important. Children, children. Money, money. For starters...

Anyway, Patrick McCarthy: after Victoria, he started an art gallery (The Patrick McCarthy Gallery) in Los Angeles, and we somehow became friends. There were children involved, his daughter and mine, and he behaved like a gentleman. And he also put together this collage (see above). It's a variation on Four Incarnations, my Coffee House Press book. Four images, four incarnations. Also, excerpts from four (?) poems, one titled Turning 60; another, Prayer For My Mother, provided the phrase, "O murdering heaven..." The other lines are mine, but I don't know where they come from. So how can I be sure they're mine? Well, in fact, I think most are from those two poems, Turning 60 and Prayer For My Mother.

Anyway, the collage is here because, in my mind, it helps bridge the gap, the movement from 14-15 years in Canada to the U.S. And now Patrick is a friend. I've even written a poem for his daughter, Dante Paradiso, Actress (p. 150, The Collected). His daughter, like mine, was born in Canada (both are Canadian citizens) and his, like mine, now lives in Los Angeles. Excerpt from the Dante Paradiso poem:

"...I love L.A. traffic because it means
a whole lot of other people are here too." [she says]

She's half way into the intersection
waiting to make a left turn
against

Four lanes of oncoming DeVilles.
'L.A.'s famous for this. I love
how huge it is,' she says,

'seeing strangers I'll never see again. And the restaurants...
and the guys...

'I should have been born here.
Anyway, I corrected the problem...'"

--
Writing this I send email to my daughter who replies:

"Dad,

"Interesting that you should ask about Canada. Yes, I feel I have
a foot in both countries. Last night I had many dreams about the
[Toronto] Island. I dreamt that I went back to visit Irina and the Island
was totally invaded with people from the city. It was no longer
'island' life. There was a bridge connecting the city to the
island and houses, hundreds of houses, were being built..."

And, in my mind, there's a psychic bridge connecting the two countries. The Canadian "Island," however, picking up on the image in my daughter's dream, is becoming more and more like L.A.

Canadian or American? Saul Bellow, Chicago and the University of Victoria

2008-02-13T17:26:00.000-08:00

Jack Foley, in his Introduction to The Collected Poems, calls me "in truth, a citizen, at heart, of both countries. At once a Canadian and American poet, one with a foot in both worlds, Sward also inhabits an enormous in-between," he writes.

As an epigraph to his Intro, Jack quotes Saul Bellow saying to me, "You don't look like a Canadian." I was setting up recording equipment in Saul Bellow's office at the University of Victoria. He was Distinguished Visiting Writer in Residence, and I was interviewing him for Quill & Quire, a national trade publication for Canada's book industry. Bellow had recently won the Nobel Prize and The Dean's December was his first book following that announcement. The Dean's December was getting negative reviews and Bellow speaks about the novel's reception. (Note: This 1982 interview appears on my website, http://www.robertsward.com - Click on Poems and scroll down for Interviews.)

Anyway, there we were, two Chicagoans. Bellow, though born in Montreal, looked "Chicagoan." He had that look. And, for myself, I suppose I hadn't lost the "Chicago look" either. But did he mean Jewish? Or did he mean something else?

Although gone so many years from the States, at that moment I wanted nothing more in life than to go back to the U.S. Seeing Bellow made me homesick.

My wife once asked, "What was it like anyway, teaching at the University of Victoria?"

"Well, I remember the first faculty party, September, 1969. I found myself talking to this portly, red-faced, jowly, steak-and-kidney pie academic. Head of the University's freshman English program. He asked what I thought of Victoria. 'Provincial, quiet, friendly... clean... and, strangely, every home I've seen so far has a well-tended flower garden." No accident, either, Victoria being home to the famous Butchart Gardens.

He seemed pleased to hear I'd been living in New England--writing at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

"My family moved here from New England, too," he said. "We left because of the Revolution."

What? At first I thought he was saying he too was a new arrival. Maybe someone who, in 1969, in the midst of the Vietnam era, had grown fed up with Nixon, and decided America was on the brink of revolution. There were some at the time who thought that way.

"What do you mean, Revolution?" I asked.

"The American Revolution. My ancestors left America after the Boston Tea Party. We're United Empire Loyalists."

Suddenly America seemed really very far away.

Toronto Island - Vancouver Island, Lotus Land

2008-02-11T22:22:00.000-08:00

Book tour coming up and I'll be re-visiting both Victoria, B.C. on Vancouver Island and the Toronto Islands (see last posting). I lived 14 - 15 years in Canada, the entire time on one or the other of these two islands. They're beautiful and seductive places... Poets Sean Virgo and Susan Musgrave were among the first people I met in Victoria (I arrived in 1969 to teach at UVic). Born and raised in Chicago, I had no idea what "Lotus Land" meant... but that's how they described Victoria. Turned out they were right. And it was the 1970s and I partook, consuming... lotus to the left of me, lotus to the right... lotus, lotus all around.

Term comes from the land of the lotus eaters in The Odyssey, where people ate lotus flowers and 'A single taste of this native fruit made my soldiers forget everything they had ever known; where they were from, where they were going, everything.' A contributor to the online Urban Dictionary writes, 'It is in reference to Vancouver's laid back attitude and prominent drug culture (especially the large scale use and acceptance of marijuana).'

"Hey, I'm going to Lotus Land."

I'm old and uncool... but... just writing this puts me back in the time.

Then, when you want to leave, that's when the fun begins. I'd come to the University of Victoria to give a 45-minute poetry reading. Also to visit and teach a couple classes. The 45-minute reading turned into a job offer, a good job offer. I accepted. Lots of money, for me anyway. Plus moving expenses. I arrived with the idea of staying one academic year. Then got re-hired and stayed another year. Then got promoted to Assistant Professor and hired to stay two more years. Bought a house on Saint David Street. My daughter was born.

Ten years after the 45 minute reading I was still there. Along the way the Department decided my poetry was incomprehensible and, further, that my teaching "controversial." They objected to my holding classes at my home. Left the University. Started building the publishing house, Soft Press ("The spirit in man is soft. It can go anywhere." It was William Stafford who gave us the name for the press and we, in turn, published his book, In the Clock of Reason.

Then, in 1979, on to another Island. An archipelago. The Toronto Islands. A sometimes sub-zero lotus land. Surrounded by water. Above high tide, well, not always. Isolated from other significant land masses. Yes. The Toronto Islands met the definition. And, like Vancouver Island, very very hard to leave once you got there. Islands. Proceed with caution.

Igloo Party Sat. Night Drinking Toronto

2008-02-10T19:32:00.000-08:00

Saturday Night Igloo Feb., East of Yonge St., Toronto / Old brewery area... St. Paul Street...

I started thinking about leaving Toronto one evening with my ex-, minus 30 degrees, asthma kicking in and I stopped breathing. There's a rhyme there, somehow, breathing and leaving... now, 23 years later, on OK terms with my ex-, she just relayed these igloo .jpgs so I can see what life is like for her and her mate in good old Toronto. Igloo images arrive and I don't want to say how I'm about to leave for the University to go swimming in that outdoor Olympic size pool, sun shining... I'm 74 years old and every day I say a prayer thanking God I'm living where I'm living. And again I say the prayer. It's a simple prayer. It goes like this: Thank God!

But Toronto was OK. My then-wife and I and our children lived on the Toronto Islands, a Lake Ontario archipelago made up of 15 separate islands, including Ward's Island, Algonquin Island, Centre Island, Muggs (the bird sanctuary), Snug (the Royal Canadian Yacht Club), and Donut, where, in the early 80s we used to skate lugging bottles of wine... and rum... and beer...

The place was sometimes called 'the Coney Island of Canada...' 'Canada's Lido,' or so said Charles Dudley Warner, 19th Century American humorist. Other people from the States lived there, writers, painters, book and magazine editors, CBC broadcasters, teachers... eccentrics, including some who never left the Islands, though it was only 15 minutes by ferry to downtown Toronto. Many of us commuted--via ferry--to and from The City. "Sounds romantic," says a friend, listening as I read aloud.

We lived there for five years (1979-1985), didn't own a car (none allowed), rode bicycles, walked and took the ferry... subways and streetcars in The City. Total population: 750 people, when we were there. A Peaceable Kingdom. Well, with the usual thing that comes with a close-knit, small townish gossipy community. But it was a community. That got me.

My book, The Toronto Islands, an Illustrated History, (ISBN 0-919567-22-3) was published by Dreadnaught in 1983. Lots of media stuff, lots of coverage... book became a bestseller. Lots of great photographs. Well, good luck finding a copy! Now out of print...

Researching The Toronto Islands, I discovered that America actually invaded Upper Canada and "impregnable" Gibraltar Point (fortified around 1793 to withstand a siege from the Americans) was one of the casualties of the War of 1812... in 1813, sixteen American ships entered Toronto Harbour and "behaved in a manner no self-respecting Canadian mentions in public." So I learned... "my country" had invaded Canada! Had attacked the very Island where we lived.

It was in retaliation for the American burning of York--and, yes, destruction of the blockhouse on Gibraltar Point (part of the Toronto Islands) that the British fleet sailed up the Potomac and burned the American capital. To cover up the damage wrought by smoke and fire, the Americans simply whitewashed the President's residence, from which it derives its present name, the White House.

So, the White House is white because of American military action on Toronto Island during the War of 1812.

There's a drawing by Owen Staples circa 1914 that shows the arrival of the American fleet prior to the capture of York. It's reproduced in The Toronto Islands. "Call your publisher," says G., thumbing through the pages, "get 'em to republish the book!"

The Toronto Island Community
http://torontoisland.org/

Where was I? Oh, that igloo in the city, just walking distance from Yonge Street. Yeah. Seems like another lifetime. And the Island was really cold!

Mort Marcus' "Striking Through the Masks, A Literary Memoir"

2008-02-06T23:40:00.001-08:00

Santa Cruz, CA - Mort Marcus' "Striking Through the Masks, A Literary Memoir" arrives...

[Thurs., March 13, 7 PM Book launch reading for Mort’s latest... Readers and performers include California poet laureate Al Young, Deng Ming-Dao, Ellen Bass, Geoffrey Dunn, James D. Houston, Jean Wakasuki Houston, Sandy Lydon, George Ow, Jr., Cheryl Anderson with the Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus and Cantiamo. Holy Cross Parish Hall, 170 High St., Santa Cruz. Free. Co-sponsored by Poetry Santa Cruz]

For more on Mort Marcus,
http://www.mortonmarcus.com/masks.html

For more on Poetry Santa Cruz
http://www.baymoon.com/~poetrysantacruz/

In the 20 years I've known him, as personal friend and colleague at Cabrillo College, as co-host of KUSP's Poetry Show (the longest running poetry radio program in the U.S.), as author of ten volumes of poetry, as film reviewer and as Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year, Mort Marcus has impressed me as a gifted and extraordinarily generous person, an enthusiast, at once sharp, discerning and unusually open to a wide range of poets and styles.

Mort is one of the reasons why I feel at home here. Something about Santa Cruz makes it possible for a writer or, indeed, any artist, to feel supported, sustained... true, the place is sometimes beyond tolerant. Great! It makes up for all those other places where generosity of spirit is in short supply.

There's a difference between solitude and isolation. You can't write without solitude, so it seems to me. But it's what you feel when you emerge from your "cave" that makes the difference... it's possible to emerge and realize no one gives a good goddamn what you've been up to. And it's also possible to emerge and re-enter the community, so to speak. It's the couple hundred member Poetry Santa Cruz... a group that organizes readings, lots of readings, runs a lively website and does all it can to get the word out... and then the people who actually turn out, the local bookstores (Bookshop Santa Cruz and the Capitola Book Cafe) that sponsor readings, the Museum of Art and History, another venue... plus a multitude, it seems, of 5 - 10 member writing groups, which meet to critique member's work. And the standard, generally speaking, is pretty high.

I came here in 1985 after 14 years in Canada. Twenty-three years later... Santa Cruz is home. And, one way and another, with his KUSP Poetry Show, his teaching, his bringing in writers from around the country, Mort helped create what most writers here feel... which is to say sustained... in a loose-knit, but still strong and supportive writing community. This sounds a little over the top, a little Better Business Bureau... I dunno, I been around, I've learned to know when I'm in a hell hole, a hell hole for me anyway, and when there's something else to emerge into... "Many beautiful people with much light" is how Baba Ram Dass described another community I lived in... in Canada... the description applies as well to Santa Cruz.

--
A few years ago I interviewed Mort for Caesura, Sept. 2004, the 25th Anniversary Issue of a magazine published by Poetry Center San Jose.

Imagination and the Shape-Shifting Beast:
An Interview with Morton Marcus – (excerpted from 4,400 word interview)

[Begins with a little background - Q/A follows]

The Britannica Yearbook said of When People Could Fly that in Marcus “the prose poem found a marvelous godfather,” and Publisher’s Weekly called the book “unerring” in its “vital retellings of our myths.” Regarding the same book, critic Peter Johnson said that “Marcus is writing some of the best prose poems being published today” and “his sensibility and poetics will continue to influence...the next generation,” while poet Vern Rutsala wrote that the book “strikes me as a major contribution to our lives and to our literature.”

Marcus taught English and Film at Cabrillo College for thirty years, until his retirement in 1998. His sixteen-part televison history of film, Movie Milestones, has been shown on many cable television stations, and is the main visual source of film history at the AFTRS, the Australian national film school. He has been a longtime co-host of KUSP radio’s “The Poetry Show” and is the co-host of the film review television show “CinemaScene” on the AT &T Broadband network in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and San Jose. He also leads a film discussion group at Santa Cruz’s Nickelodeon theater on the first and third Saturday of every month. He has curated film series at various museums and has taken part in several panels on literature and film at the John Steinbeck Center.

Interview (brief excerpt)

1. ROBERT: Mort, what do you mean by plain style?

MORTON MARCUS: To me, plain style is clear style: clarity of expression that is always conversational in essence and tone. It is never ornate or pursues verbal pyrotechnics. Although I've used many approaches in my poems over the years, for the most part I've presented them with an austere clarity, almost a simplicity of grammar and vocabulary. And again, I'm more concerned with giving the impression of a voice speaking than singing. That's pretty much William Carlos Williams’ legacy for the poets who started writing in the 1950s and after. Find the American voice box, he said, We don’t speak English; we speak American. And we speak, we don’t sing. So with me, voice rhythms are all. As is clarity. The pursuit of clarity has always been a conscious decision on my part and has to do with my focus on imagery and metaphor as the core of my work.

2. RS: How do you hear your poems? That is, what do you "hear" first in your mind and--tricky question--how then do your poems find their way from head space, so to speak, to the physical page?

MM: One of the ways, a predominant way I think, that I develop a poem is through imagining a voice speaking, a particular voice that is talking to me or which I'm overhearing, a voice whose rhythm and tone I let guide the method and structure of what I'm writing in so far as tone, line length, stanzaic arrangement and form are concerned—some of the latter, of course, are only relevant when I'm writing verse poems.

3. RS: You're saying the voice mode is primary…

MM: No, that’s just one way I develop a poem; a major way, it’s true. But for me, the voice is secondary to the imagery and/or metaphors that reveal themselves in the course of the writing.

4. RS: Explain.

MM: Maybe if I described one of the methods I use to write a poem, this will become clearer. But let me warn you that my description may sound fanciful…

To begin with, images and metaphors in almost all cases appear like golden medallions in the vaulted darkness of my psyche.

5. RS: if I may say so, the preceding sentence strikes me as out of keeping with what you said earlier about “plain style.”

MM: No, no. You’re confusing two things here. My imagery may be baroque, even decadent, but my language is plain.—And I warned you that this might sound fanciful. But let me go on. I was saying that images and metaphors in almost all cases appear like golden medallions in the vaulted darkness of my psyche. Let me add that their appearances are unplanned and unexpected. A long time ago I decided that these appearances were in many cases the beginning of the creative act for me, and that it was my task to pursue their meanings by following their development, which many times consisted of grappling with their changes in shape and direction. Is that clear so far?

"Earthquake Collage," Blue Moon Review, Santa Cruz downtown, 1989

2008-02-04T20:52:00.001-08:00

For more:
http://www.thebluemoon.com/quake/

Blue Moon Review editor Doug Lawson and his family here for Sunday visit, Feb. 3. I think of Blue Moon as the first quality literary magazine to appear on the Internet, but I may have a slight prejudice. Following the Oct. 17, 1989 *Loma Prieta / Santa Cruz earthquake, I went downtown (70% destroyed in the quake) and took 40 or 50 photos, some of which (see above) found their way into a 2o-page electronic chapbook, which Doug generously edited and designed. The "finished" work appeared in 1995, a year or so after **Blue Moon came into existence.

Following the quake, I started writing in form and contributed some not very good villanelles, etc., plus excerpts from my "earthquake" journals combined with stuff gleaned from newspapers and magazines... the best of the writing is from my students, who reported on their experiences... I obtained their permission to reprint... what stands out in my mind is how we were all, 5:04 PM, Oct. 17, 1989, experiencing the same thing at the same time... I was in the bathroom taking a pee, readying myself to go off to Foothill / DeAnza College to teach a class.

Later, a local college (not one of the above) agreed to host the complete (20 or so pages) chapbook online, but then dropped it when I retired... dropped it without telling me they were dropping it. And for years, up until yesterday, in fact, I had thought the thing no longer existed... other than a few fragments, scattered photos... I tried, but wasn't able to find it in Blue Moon's archive.

So I feel re-born... and plan, with Doug's permission, to host it also on my website. In fact, that's what I plan to do right now, ask permission.
---

* Sometimes called the San Francisco Earthquake. Loma Prieta, in honor of a remote peak near the quake's epicenter. It's a Spanish name. Loma Prieta, the Earthquake of the Dark Hill.

** For the record, Doug Lawson's Blue Moon Review was preceded by Blue Penny Quarterly (BPQ), which first appeared in 1994. Having worked as a technical writer for the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in 1988-89, I was primed... ready to go when BPQ, Zero City and the others came online. See below for more:

http://www.thebluemoon.com/quake/

--

Why I Publish In E-Zines: One Writer's View of Online Publishing
--by Robert Sward – (Originally published in 1996)

Computer-phobic writers, fellow freelancers and fans of olde style lit-mags ask why I have chosen to publish in e-zines like Web del Sol / Perihelion; Alsop Review; Blue Moon Review; X-Connect; eSCENE; Gruene Street; Realpoetik; Recursive Angel; Transmog; and Zero City, to name a few.

1. I publish on the Net and World Wide Web because it's cheap: email after all is free.
2. It's more efficient: no SASEs, no International Reply Coupons; fewer trips to the office supply store.
3. It saves time: I don't have to wait 18 months to hear back and the rejections, when they come, are less annoying because a) I've invested less in the submission process and b) it's easy enough to send the work somewhere else.
4. It gives me the opportunity to improve on what I write and make changes even after publication. Zen Buddhists say First thought, best thought. I say, Think again.
5. It allows for interaction: timely feedback from fellow writers, editors, publishers, agents, and students.

I recently (remember, this is 1996) sent a poem to Realpoetik ("rpoetik, the little magazine of the Internet, a moderated listserv..."), got an email acceptance message and saw the poem published, all within 24 hours. Editor Robert Salasin claims he has approximately 3,000 subscribers. All I know is that over the next few days I got more responses ("fine work...," "wish you continued success in Cyberspace...," "would like to use excerpts from A Much-Married Man...") from that single appearance than I got from 30 years of publishing in magazines like The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Transatlantic Review, etc.

Yes, it's a form of instant gratification. Just what the world needs, right? In my opinion, instant gratification has gotten a bad rap. Or maybe I'm late to the game and am just beginning to catch on. Anyway, I write for myself and always have, but I still agree with Whitman: it doesn't hurt to have an audience.

I still use pen and pencil to write and revise and turn to my Olympia portable to type envelopes. I'm still doing what I did in my 20s: writing, revising and sending the best work I have to the editors of the journals I admire.

Writing is re-writing and I spend just as much time revising now as I ever did. To this day I send poems and stories to traditional print journals and, when the publication appears, sometimes long to remove a line or two or correct a typo or printers error. A while back the then London-based Transatlantic Review published Thousand-Year-Old Fiancee and destroyed the poem, made it meaningless with a record thirteen typographical errors. They never sent me page proofs and, once the poem was printed, there was nothing I could do except rage at the editor, the inattentive, lackadaisical schmuck.

Now, when I submit work to an e-journal there is no typographer involved because there is no type to set. And if an error occurs or I change my mind, voila! I can e-mail corrections and see the fix made promptly and at no expense. I like that.

Apart from an increasingly large, responsive audience, what's the payoff? Payment used to be in contributor copies. Now with magazines appearing in electronic print, there are no contributor copies to send. Still, a few mainline lit-mags and e-journals do make an effort to pay. In all the years I've been writing, I haven't come close--not one year have I come close--to covering the cost of postage. How much is poetry worth? In 1958, in an effort to determine the dollar value, if any, of my poetry, I engaged in an experiment. A student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, I sent half a dozen poems to the local phone company as a way of paying my bill. Not only did Ma Bell send them back, but she disconnected my phone. So be it.

*

I'm doing multi-media stuff now combining poetry, fiction and non- fiction with photographs, paintings, movies and--soon--music and the human voice. I'm collaborating with visual artists, computer scientists and other writers. If you're interested, check out Earthquake Collage and Highway 17 on my home page.

My first computer was an Apple IIe and my first word processing program was Magic Window. Today I use Microsoft Word and Photoshop on a Mac G-4, supercharged by my son. How does it all work? I have no idea. I just switch on my modem, gaze into cyberspace and type away. It's still Magic Window to me.

"So what's the point?" my partner wants to know. "Isn't this just one big ego trip? Who really reads those e-journals? Do you actually think you're going to sell copies of your books on the Net? And what about copyright? How do you know someone isn't going to rip off that new book of poems of yours?"

Of course she's right, but I have all those virtual magazines and editors on the Net waiting for me to check in.

"Gee, honey, I don't know," I say. "I'm just gonna go upstairs for a moment and check my mail."

Copyright (c) 1996, 2001, 2007, Robert Sward

John Currin, Porno, the New Yorker and Leopard Dog

2008-01-31T22:56:00.003-08:00

Reading "Lifting the Veil - Old Masters, pornography, and the works of John Currin" - New Yorker profile, 1.28.08.

Currin says, "I'd like to get the sex thing over with, but I realized I'm not done with it... You should never will a change in your work--you have to work an idea to death. I often find the best things happen when you're near the end."

True of the podiatrist father sequence (God is in the Cracks, dialogues and monologues between a father and son) and now, more recently, of the Shelby the Dog poems, some of which, like Currin's paintings, derive from porn and images and descriptions of sex products. Actually, both Shelby (above, in the greenery) and Leopard Dog (above, on the floor) are sex-obsessed in my poems about them, but they have higher longings as well. I don't know about you, but sex has always fueled my imagination. Or, should I say "imaginations," and those other areas beyond... anything to do with sex. Sex is part and parcel of our "divine conscious energy." That kundalini energy, truth, consciousness, bliss...

And like Currin, I too sometimes long and would like "to get the sex thing over with..."

But there it is in the quasi autobiographical Lenore and the Leopard Dog sequence (God is in the Cracks, pp. 53-59) with the young boy and newly arrived voyeuristic animal peeping through the keyhole as Father and Father's wife-to-be make love:

"'What, you still don't get it? says Dog,
thwacking me with his tail.
Lenore's your Mommy, little boy;
Wicky Wicky's your Father.
You had mother.
Now you have another.'

Hands on his shoulders, she sits on father,
moves up and down.

"Now you see it, now you don't," she says.

"Bad Lenore, Bad. That's not Dog," says Dog,
barking at the keyhole.

"There is man and woman and a third thing, too,
in us, says the poet. That's the eye in the heart
that sees into the invisible. The goal, Poet says, is to see
with the eye of the heart so like sees like." [says Father... the Poet of course is Rumi]

"Shut up," she says, "shut up and schtupp."

"Oh God, marry me," he says, "marry me."

--
Well, the sex is part of the narrative. It's also fuel, powers the higher longings, so-called, and the endlessly fascinating, endlessly fascinating. As someone commented today on my post "Words, Words, Words,"

I think words can form a nest you can settle down in or can act as ammunition to blow your security apart. They are tools, also, to get the work of life done. I think of a line from a Frost poem "...each tool I step on... turns into a weapon."

And, as John Currin says, "Pornography is so associated with photography, and so dependent on the idea that the camera doesn't intercede between you and the subject. One motive of mine is to see if I could make this clearly debased and unbeautiful thing become beautiful in a painting."

And in poetry. And in a canine's view of humans doing the deed. Bow wow. Bow wow. Or, as Shelby the dog puts it, "Bow fucking wow!"

Chicago, 1930s, 40s...

2008-01-29T16:44:00.000-08:00

I miss the place. Now and then an image like this winter scene appears and I'm right there. Yet, when I think back to my childhood in Chicago in the 1930s and 40s, and compare that with the present, it is as if that earlier time were like... not only another lifetime, but (life) on another planet. Yet the pang... homesickness... and, oddly, living in Toronto (1979 - 1985), a city that in many ways reminded me of our old Albany Park / Lawrence Avenue neighborhood in Chicago... never quite satisfied that feeling, that sense of what was missing. I longed for home.

So the Dr. Sward's Cure for Melancholia postings (Dr. Sward being my father, not me), they're like love letters, is that a joke? love letters to... Chicago... 'cause that's home, that's where it started, mother, father, podiatry, Jewishness and all the rest. Melancholia included...

And the most real thing from the 40s and 50s was what? The dogs. Fluffy the spaniel and the sickly pathetic mutts we'd rescue from the Chicago Dog Pound. "The Pound..." as in impounded. We're impounding your dog. And the truck the Dog Catcher would use to carry 'em away... and the gas you'd see escaping when the door swung open... and the dogs and what I felt for them. Sentimental slop, but it hasn't gone away. So something about that time may be "another lifetime... life on another planet..." but I haven't forgotten the dogs and my feelings for the city are constant, my feelings for the dogs are constant... if there's a NOW, it's dogs, city and heart. And family, too.

Robyn Sarah - A Day's Grace... Imagination

2008-01-24T23:52:00.000-08:00

Grace Notes: A Conversation
with Robyn Sarah

Excerpted from Literary Magazine Review,
Volume 25, Nos. 1 & 2,
Anniversary Issue - just published

Note: A shortened version of our conversation appeared in Nimrod, International Issue, 2005. Literary Magazine Review has published the full version, updated. Excerpt from Q/A follows:

Born in New York City to Canadian parents, Robyn Sarah grew up in Montreal, studying at the Conservatoire de Musique du Quebec and at McGill University. She has published primarily in Canada, though work of hers has appeared in Hudson Review, Poetry Chicago, New England Review and others. I first met Robyn and came to know her poetry when we read together on the same program at the Art Bar in Toronto. I have always tended to carry on imaginary conversations with writers whose work excites me. What follows is a very brief excerpt from a substantial interview, a "real" conversation conducted by email, covering many different aspects of the writing life. For more, please see the latest Literary Magazine Review (LMR), referenced above.

Whatever else this blog is about... it's about imagination, healing, poetry, how one scribbler reads and converses with another, and, also, grace... and the connection between grace and imagination... and what it's like, speaking for myself, to have no imagination, no grace, zilch... and coming back... fucking line by line... anyway, excerpt of a conversation:
____

ROBT: As you understand it, Robyn, what is Imagination? Peter Ackroyd in his biography, Blake, suggests the poet's inspiration and visionary experiences were part of a special fate, a natural gift, perhaps inherited, and that for Blake, Imagination was primary, a near sacred element in his life and his work. As a poet, what do you understand by that word, Imagination?

ROBYN: It's a scary word for me, imagination. I don't think I have very much imagination, the real world is always more than enough for me. When I was in my teens my piano teacher once made a remark, "Actually we learn by imagination, not by experience", which I wrote down and brooded on for years, but I'm still not sure what he meant by it or what it means. Recently I came across a conversation I recorded in an old journal, a remark someone made at a party: "Imagination is knowing what to do next." I hang on to these snippets hoping to understand them one day... For me, inspiration takes two possible forms. Sometimes words come into my head—fragmentary phrases that I like the sound of—I call them “tinder words” because they’re like fire-starter for poems. Or sometimes it’s a sudden feeling I get, that the thing I’m looking at is infused with mysterious significance--that it is both itself and more than itself. It's like the world jumps into a different kind of focus. I can't make it happen, I don't have control over it, but I try to arrange my life to keep myself open to it. Is this "imagination"? Whatever it is, I know that when it's not there, I can't write poetry. And I don't even try.

William Stafford, "What's In My Journal"

2008-01-17T15:14:00.000-08:00

Blog, Journal, Scrapbook... or collage... William Stafford names it...

"What's In My Journal"
by William Stafford, from Crossing Unmarked Snow

"Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
Thing, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knickknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can't find them. Someone's terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine."

--

Have always liked the guy's work and, in the early 70s, published his little book In The Clock of Reason with Soft Press, located in our basement at 1050 St. David St., Victoria, B.C. Handset, signed, numbered... and some complained about the price we sold it for, $4.95. Because it was handset and I was a little too much into the 60s / 70s spirit, distracted, finding it hard to discipline / learn the craft, loving Stafford's work, but resistant to putting a whole day into typesetting a poem, In The Clock of Reason took a while to finish. One afternoon, in fact, Stafford simply appeared at the door, arrived from Portland. So that got things going...

--

[from Wikipedia]

"One of the most striking features of his career is that he began publishing his poetry only later in life. His first major collection of poetry Traveling Through the Dark was published when he was forty-eight years old. It won the National Book Award the following year in 1963. The title poem is one of Stafford's most well known works. It describes an experience of encountering a recently killed doe on a mountain road. Before pushing the doe off into the canyon, the poet discovers that the doe was pregnant and the fawn inside the doe is still alive.

"Stafford had a quiet daily ritual of writing and his writing focuses on the ordinary. The gentle quotidian style of his poetry has been compared to Robert Frost. His poems are typically short, focusing on the earthy, accessible details appropriate to a specific locality. In a 1971 interview, Stafford said:

"I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along."[1]

"He was a close friend and collaborator with the poet Robert Bly. Despite his late start, he was a frequent contributor to magazines and anthologies and eventually published fifty-seven volumes of poetry. James Dickey called Stafford one of those poets "who pour out rivers of ink, all on good poems."[2] He kept a daily journal for 50 years, and composed nearly 22,000 poems, of which roughly 3,000 were published.

"In 1970, he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that is now known as Poet Laureate. In 1975, he was named Poet Laureate of Oregon. In 1980, he retired from Lewis and Clark College but continued to travel extensively and give public readings of his poetry. In 1992, he won the Western States Book Award for lifetime achievement in poetry.[3]

"He died of a heart attack in Lake Oswego, Oregon on August 28, 1993, having written a poem that morning containing the line "You don't have to be good," my mother said; "just be ready for what God sends." [4] His works are still held by the Stafford family, and managed by Kim Stafford and Paul Merchant at the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark College."

Robert Bly in Santa Cruz

2008-01-17T00:34:00.001-08:00

First met Robert Bly when he read with James Wright at Cornell University back in 1963. Bly has been a friend, someone who provided just what was needed in those years I struggled with the podiatrist father / son poems, the ones that found their way into God is in the Cracks and now this new work, Doctor Sward's Cure for Melancholia. And a volume scheduled for publication in the U.S. in 2011, a New & Selected... the last four books were published by Black Moss Press and distributed largely in Canada.

Bly read a few days ago (Jan. 13) in Santa Cruz, upstairs, above the Blue Lagoon, in a venue called The Attic. Full house, several hundred people, $10. a ticket. Robert's third reading here in 3 years. Nils Peterson, poet from the San Jose Poetry Center / SJ State University does the Intro, "a poet and a cause for poetry in others," he says of Bly, which is fair.

Bly reads, if I got it straight, "Turkish Pears in August," new book? More than in his two previous readings he speaks about poetics, nitty gritty of poetry... sounds, syllables, vowels, odd ways of rhyming... drawing on Middle Eastern traditions... and of course there is musical accompaniment. So the music and the poetry come together. Musicians: Marcus Wise on tabla and Bruce Hamm on sarod. And there was a harmonica in there for a while too. You don't often go to a poetry reading and hear tabla, sarod and harmonica... in moving harmony... yeah, that was interesting.

Bly speaks of "Momma's boys," in fact, calls himself a Momma's boy, and reads his recent translation of Ibsen's *Peer Gynt, the passage where a young man provides comfort, solace, whatever it is one does when someone is dying... for his mother to ease her passage... moving, beautiful passages.. in fact, the high point of the evening, for me.

That word "beauty," "beautiful..." I'm so fucking old, old enough, anyway, to have heard Robert Frost read at Bread Loaf and compliment himself, say how, to the best of his (Frost's) knowledge, he had managed over the years to use the word "beautiful..." only once, maybe twice in his poetry. Beautiful, beautiful... where did you ever get the idea that word was poetic? That it even belonged in a poem, any poem?

Bly like a latter day Ezra Pound (it has long seemed to me), translating and introducing North American readers to poets they might not otherwise have heard. Swedish poets like Martinson, Ekelof, and Transtromer... plus Neruda and Vallejo, Lorca and Jimenez...

Photo by J.J. Webb

* Peer Gynt (IPA: [per gʏnt]) is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was written in 1867, and first performed in Christiania (now Oslo) on 24 February 1876, with incidental music by the composer Edvard Grieg. Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt while traveling in Rome, on Ischia and in Sorrento. It was first published on November 14, 1867, in Copenhagen. The first edition comprised 1,250 copies. It was followed by a re-print of 2,000 copies after 14 days. The large sales were mostly due to the success of Ibsen's previous play, Brand. Unlike Ibsen's other later plays, Peer Gynt is written in verse. This is because it was originally intended to be a written drama, not for stage performance. Difficulties due to rapid and frequent change of scene (including an entire act in pitch darkness) render the play troublesome to perform. It is also unlike Ibsen's later plays in that it is a fantasy rather than a realistic tragedy. Perhaps the most famous aspect of this play is Grieg's music piece entitled In the Hall of the Mountain King.

*Wikipedia

Jaded Princess #2, details... Museum of Art & History, Santa Cruz, Feb. 23 - July 1

2008-01-13T17:10:00.001-08:00

For more on Gloria Alford and The Princess:
http://www.gloriaalford.com

The Jaded Princess, Gloria K. Alford

2008-01-13T15:38:00.000-08:00

Museum of Art & History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz, Feb. 23 - July 1. Show featuring work inspired by the art & history of China. Reception 4 - 6 PM, Sat., Feb. 23.

For more on MAH and upcoming event:
http://www.santacruzmah.org/
---

We're a couple. I scribble, she sculpts and paints... The Jaded Princess will be part of a Museum-Wide Exhibition, "Ying: Inspired by the Art and History of China," coming up at Santa Cruz' Museum of Art and History (MAH). The show runs from February 23 to July 1. The Jaded Princess, a life-size sculpture made in the late 1970s, took a year to produce and was constructed using antique circuit boards. Gloria's piece is a replica of the Chinese Jade Burial Suit of Chinese Princess Tou Wan, Han Dynasty, 140 B.C.

According to the catalog, "The concept of this exhibition resulted from [Curator Susan Hillhouse's] visits to the studios of a group of artists" in Chengde, China. "...this museum-wide presentation opens a new path of discovery through contemporary artists from China, the Bay area and Santa Cruz, deepening our understanding of Santa Cruz County's many cultural heritages."

Gloria's Jaded Princess has been exhibited in several Art & Technology shows, at UC Santa Cruz, in San Jose and elsewhere. Hopefully, one day Bill Gates will see and want to purchase it.

Artist's Bio:

GLORIA ALFORD became a mixed media artist by default. Refused admittance into a Graduate Art Program in Madison, Wisconsin, she enrolled instead in a Home Economics course where she learned printmaking. But on cloth, not paper. She went on to use some non-traditional methods and materials, such as solar cells, hand-made paper, plastic, cloth, computer chips, plus acrylic, watercolor, and methods like vacuum forming plastic, collage and paint.

Gloria’s best-known piece, The Jaded Princess, represents the artist's concern with the duality of technology--a provider of "the good life" and, at the same time, a vehicle for destruction. The circular chips covering the princess' brain are bomb detonators, by design. However, Ms. Alford's princess is intended as an affirmation--a sleeping beauty, or technology preserved, awaiting awakening by the prince of technology.

Exhibited at the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, Gloria's mixed-media work, said the Museum's Director "was popular with the conservatives as it was with the more avant garde enthusiasts."

Still true to her origins as a mixed media artist, Gloria Alford now works with varieties of paint and collage on paper and canvas.

For more, see:
http://www.gloriaalford.com

and the posting that follows this.

Words, Words, Words

2008-01-13T12:27:00.001-08:00

Following up on (previous) posting re: William James' Principles of Psychology and James' thoughts on what has come to be known as "stream of consciousness," I think of Gloria K. Alford's painting titled "Words," Acrylic on Paper, 22 x 30... which appears here with her permission. If it's possible for a painting to catch something of the nature of language, language of a certain kind... language coming into being, language (and this is going to sound strange), taking the form of "words," and, for me anyway, tapping into what I think of as "stream of consciousness," well, this painting does that. Gloria doesn't often include words in her pieces, and I'm not exactly sure how or why it happens here. But... well, one day I may use it as a cover for a book, again, with her permission.

I know, but don't know... "What's it all about?" I ask. "Words, words, words," she says. "How much communication happens with words? There's so much, speaking, but also the printed word, which is what I have in mind. Nothing profound. Any kind of meaning you want to give it is okay by me," she says. "Which is itself," I say, "a way of playing with words, giving it back to the reader..." Back, in other words, to the beginning, to Gloria's question, "How much communication happens with words?"

Consciousness, Garrison Keillor, Writers Almanac

2008-01-11T14:20:00.001-08:00

I know, it's right there... Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac, an archive of his radio show. Consciousness... well, this, on William James' birthday, January 11... what is a blog? It's a journal, an archive, a record of where you've been and what you've thought and what led you there, here, there, the track(s). Enough that it be for yourself. Someone else cares to look in? Fine. Anyway, here's a snippet of what I want to save:

It's the birthday of the psychologist and philosopher William James, born in New York City (1842). He was the older brother of the novelist Henry James, and one of the most prominent thinkers of his era. He was a man who started out studying medicine and went on to become one of the founders of modern psychology, and finished his life as a prominent philosopher. He was a professor of physiology at Harvard when he was hired to write a textbook about the new field of psychology, which was challenging the idea that the body and the mind were separate. He could have just written a summary of all the current ideas in the field but instead decided to explore the issues of psychology he found most interesting and perplexing. He took twelve years to finish the book called, The Principles of Psychology (1890). It was used as a textbook in college classrooms, but was also translated into a dozen different languages, and people read it all over the world.

One of the ideas he developed in the book was a theory of the human mind which he called "a stream of consciousness." Before him the common view was that a person's thoughts have a clear beginning and end, and that the thinker is in control of his or her thoughts. But William James wrote, "Consciousness ... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows."

James's ideas about consciousness were especially influential on writers, and novelists from James Joyce to William Faulkner began to portray streams of consciousness through language, letting characters think at length and at random on the page. Consciousness itself became one of the most important subjects of modern literature. He also helped invent the technique of automatic writing, in which a person writes as quickly as possible whatever comes into one's head. He encouraged audiences to take up the practice as a form of self-analysis, and one person who took his advice was a student named Gertrude Stein, who went on to use it as the basis for her writing style.

William James wrote, "The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures." He also wrote, "Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."

more...

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James.

William James was born at the Astor House in New York City, son of Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.

James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., James George Frazer, Henri Bergson, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Jung.

[Wikipedia]

MARGIE, THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POETRY

2008-01-09T22:34:00.000-08:00

Back from swimming, open mail and there's Margie, The American Journal of Poetry, 2007, an annual of poetry, (440 pages!) edited by Robert Nazarene and (among others), Troy Jollimore, Canadian poet-friend and author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory. Cover photo bears the caption, Robert Nazarene, "The Boy With Nothing To Lose."

Margie includes One-Stop Foot Shop, one of the poems slated for this "work in progress" (see Blog posting #1), Dr. Sward's Cure for Melancholia. Hard to know who reads these things, but here's the poem:

ONE-STOP FOOT SHOP

Podiatrist Father:

“We walk with angels
and they are our feet.

“‘Vibrating energy packets,’” he calls them. “‘Bundles of soul
in a world of meat.’ Early warning system—
dry skin and brittle nails;
feelings of numbness and cold;
these are symptoms; they mean something.
I see things physicians miss.

“All you have to do is open your eyes, just open your eyes,
and you’ll see: seven-eighths of everything is invisible, a spirit
inside the spirit.
The soul is rooted in the foot.
As your friend Bly says, ‘The soul longs to go down’;
feet know the way to the other world,
that world where people are awake.
So do me a favor: dream me no dreams.
A dreamer is someone who’s asleep.

“You know, the material world is infinite,
but boring infinite,” he says, cigarette in hand,
little wings fluttering at his ankles.

“And women,” he says, smacking his head,
“four times as many foot problems as men.
High heels are the culprit.

“I may be a podiatrist, but I know what I’m about:
feet. Feet don’t lie,
don’t cheat, don’t kiss ass. Truth is,
peoples’ feet are too good for them.”

Baba Hari Dass

2008-01-06T00:23:00.000-08:00

In 1985, after 14 years in Canada, I wrote a feature for The Toronto Star about attending a week-long yoga retreat with Baba Hari Dass, a silent monk who communicates by writing on a small chalkboard. The retreat was held at a YMCA camp several hours north of Toronto. I attended with my then-wife and our two children, ages 8 and 14. That was the story: What is it like for a married couple and their children to do "yoga," chant, meditate, listen to talks on Ashtanga, or Eight-Limbed Yoga, and experience a new way of being together as a family?

As I understand it, one is either a monk who dedicates him/her self full-time to the discipline, or a householder. Husband to four wives, father to five children, my karma is what it is. But I've long been fascinated by that intersection, that tension between the sacred and the insane. Sorry, meant to say profane.

Apparently pleased with the article, Baba Hari Dass' people invited me and my wife, a visual artist, to teach at Mount Madonna School in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Later that year my then-spouse returned to Toronto and I stayed on at Mount Madonna. What to do? I began by seeking advice from the silent monk who I'd come to like and trust.

"How come she left?" I asked.

"She found you boring. She wants fun," he wrote on his small chalkboard.

"Am I boring?"

"No, you have different natures. Women leave you because they want excitement. You are a writer. You live in an abstract world which doesn't excite them."

"False expectations is the cause of 'broken heart,'" he continued. "Nothing is permanent. But we are looking for permanency."

Here's a man who's never been married, I thought. Would I trade places with him? Better celibacy, I decided, better the life of a monk than the hell of what one goes through with a divorce. That was then...

People ask: Does it get easier, breaking up... then breaking up and going through it again? I just shake my head.

is a silent monk who has not spoken since 1952 and communicates by writing on a small chalkboard. This verbal silence is a process which gradually quiets the mind and eliminates unwanted thoughts. While this concept may be initially difficult for most of us to understand, the example of Baba Hari Dass is ample expression of the potential for peace that lies within each of us as the result of spiritual discipline and devotion to helping others. Babaji is first and foremost a master yogi, having practiced the disciplines of yoga from childhood. In addition he is an accomplished author, builder, philosopher, sculptor, and proponent of Ayurveda (the ancient Indian system of health and healing).

http://www.mountmadonna.org/yoga/babaji.html

*Ashtanga Yoga

Ashtanga Yoga, also known as Raja Yoga, is the scientific method of enlightenment propounded [more than 2,000 years ago] by the ancient sage Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras. It is the Yoga that Baba Hari Dass has practiced since childhood. Since his arrival from India in 1971, Baba Hari Dass has been active in training students and teachers of Yoga in the United States and Canada. Through his compassionate example, young and old alike are learning the gentle art of peace.*

Because there has been much confusion over the past few years regarding the term Ashtanga, we wish to be clear that we do not teach a contemporary method of asana that has come to be known as “Power Yoga” or “Ashtanga”. Though asana (seat, or posture) is but one limb of Ashtanga Yoga and Hatha Yoga, it is often identified as Yoga.

We present the classical Ashtanga Yoga set forth more than 2,000 years ago by Patanjai in the Yoga Sutras. Ashtanga means Eight Limbed (ashta meaning eight, and anga meaning limb).

The eight limbs* are:
Restraints (Yama):
Nonviolence (Ahimsa)
Truthfulness (Satya)
Non-stealing (Asteya)
Continence (Bramacharya)
Non-possessiveness (Aparigraha)
Observances (Niyama):
Purity (Shaucha)
Contentment (Santosha)
Austerity (Tapas)
Scriptural Study (Svadhyaya)
Surrender to God (Ishvarapranidhana)
Posture, Seat (Asana)
Breath Control (Pranayama)
Withdrawing the Mind from Sense Perception (Pratyahara)
Concentration (Dharana)
Meditation (Dhyana)
Higher Consciousness (Samadhi)

http://www.mountmadonna.org/yoga/babaji.html

MEDITATING WITH RAM DASS – TEACHING A SIX-YEAR-OLD TO “SEE”

2008-01-05T18:26:00.000-08:00

MEDITATING WITH RAM DASS – TEACHING A SIX-YEAR-OLD TO “SEE”

That image of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama (see Jan. 1 posting) got me thinking of how I started... in 1968, a resident at the MacDowell Artists’ Colony, Peterborough, N.H., I learned that Ram Dass, AKA Professor Richard Alpert*, had just returned from India and was living at his father’s estate not far from Peterborough. So one afternoon--Ram Dass having agreed to see me—I set out on an adventure that continues to this day...

That was my first experience with meditation—

I returned to MacDowell and spent an afternoon with my daughter who was living nearby. I sought to impart something of what I felt I’d gotten from the experience of meditating with Ram Dass. I knew doing so would have value for her, a “gift” that would serve her for the rest of her life. That if I provided nothing else, at least there was this.

Thirty years later, a graduate of Berkeley, top of her class, an environmental scientist, she shared with me her description of the experience. She did so as she was preparing the way for me to meet one of her colleagues, Arjuna Ardagh, author and founder of the Living Essence Foundation.

“By way of introduction, when I was around 5 or 6 my Dad came home from some kind of event or class about meditation. He asked me if I’d ever stopped all my thoughts. We discussed it a bit since even at my age it was pretty obvious that just about everything required some form of thought. Dad had an innocent curiosity that still moves me. It was clear he thought my youth and awareness might provide a perspective that could otherwise be inaccessible to him. Joan Baez was on the stereo and we sat on the couch in front of the fireplace looking out the window. We agreed to try it. We sat there, me on his right, our eyes closed. Trying not to think. It didn’t work but it was my first formal introduction to meditation. Dad had an attentive, childlike, almost fixated quality when he asked how it was for me. He was on fire – passionate, desperate really, seemed willing to put anything on the line to really look, to really see. Until that moment I had believed I was the only one who had the sense to care, to really see.

“So that’s a bit of dad.”
____

*From Dr. Richard Alpert to Baba Ram Dass

In 1967 Alpert travelled to India, where he met the American spiritual seeker Bhagavan Das. As he guided him barefoot from temple to temple, Bhagavan Das began teaching Alpert basic mantras and asanas, as well as how to work with beads. After a few months Bhagavan Das led Alpert to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, or as he is better known in the West, Maharaj-ji. Maharaj-ji soon became Alpert's guru and gave him the name "Ram Dass", which means "servant of God". Under the guidance of Maharaj-ji, Ram Dass was instructed to receive teaching from Hari Dass Baba, who taught in silence using only a chalkboard. While in India, Ram Dass also corresponded with Meher Baba; however, he remained primarily focused on the teaching of Hari Dass Baba. Among other things, Hari Dass Baba trained Ram Dass in raja yoga and ahimsa. It was these life-changing experiences in India that inspired Ram Dass to write the contemporary spiritual classic, Be Here Now, in which he teaches the harmony of all people and religions.

From Wikipedia

New Year's Greeting - Peace

2008-01-01T15:57:00.001-08:00

In a bus stop shelter, as you can see... Even in Las Vegas Valley, the
spirit lives.

Happy New Year !!!!

Cry to the Muse - A Half-Dozen Poems

2007-12-28T17:32:00.000-08:00

A Half-Dozen Poems

Octavio Paz once told an interviewer, “I would like to leave a half-dozen poems that, perhaps, from time to time, would be remembered by a future reader. To be read as I have read some poets. Nothing more.”

Muse [highlights from New Yorker article - date? see below for other sources]

• Throughout history, the changing image of the Muse has reflected changes in sexual behavior and in the status of women, but the process by which the art comes into being is always sublimation. The love that the artist feels for the woman becomes spiritual: a dream of Eros, a vision. On its highest plane, where sublimation results in art that is itself sublime, the visions move historically in cycles.

Two hundred years ago, the early German Romantics infected all Europe with the idea of divine inspiration, which they had revived from the Platonic revival of the Renaissance...

• The argument: Muses are passive, therefore passe. Muses do not choose to be Muses; they are chosen. Who wants to be a symbol anyway? The Muse is only a man speaking through a woman, not the woman herself. What male artists call Woman is a construct designed to keep real women in their place.

• But when a gifted male artist embraces his Muse he... in fact made a woman appear in the art, because he has voluntarily embraced the woman in himself. Joyce's Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Tennessee Williams' Blanche DuBois...

• Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror" --a case of the painter apprehending the Muse apprehending herself. [It is not the man speaking through the woman, but the woman speaking through the man.]

• It is the being of the woman who has inspired the [gifted male artist]

• The Olympian male imagination will always do more for the woman than he would do for herself, says Arlene Croce ["No woman could have created Balanchine's choreography, yet it was so transparent that his women seemed to materialize individually under their own power."]

• Women's names were numinous: Block's wife was a Liubov (love), Mandelstam's a Nadezhda (hope). Stravinsky and Nabokov both married women named Vera (faith); the same name in Russian, with one consonant added, is Venus (Vera, Venera; Mrs. Nabokov used the French acute "e").

• As for Vera Stravinsky, who was also a painter and had been an actress, the part of Muse came easily, though even she found it necessary to set down some rules:

1. Force the artist to work, even with a stick.
2. Love his work no less than him.
3. Welcome every burst of creative energy. Kindle him with new ideas.
4. Keep the main works and the drawings, sketches, and caricatures in order. Know each work, its scheme and meaning. [Vera S. had been married 4 x, once to Russian painter Sergei Sudeikin].
5. Relate to new works as if they were surprise gifts.
6. Know how to look at a painting for hours on end.
7. Be physically perfect and, therefore, his model forever.

"You are a limitless source of life," Sudeikin wrote her in return. She could cook, too.

• The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova never doubted that she was entitled to worship the same Muse who came to men. And she herself was Muse to many others. Her "doubles" [other women who were Muse to men & to A. herself] seem to have functioned as a necessary distancing mechanism, letting her see herself more clearly.

• Without objectivity, self-study degenerates into narcissism (something Anais Nin never knew).

• Can a woman have a muse? If the Muse is that dream of Eros which inspires art, and if the woman artist is as possessed by worldly ambition as she is by the dream, then there is probably no alternative to bisexuality, writes Arlene Croce.

• It is possible to rule out Vita in favor of Vanessa as Virginia's Muse. Vanessa was Virginia's sister, and an artist and a mother.... this may mean that sister as a resource for a woman artist is under-explored. Akhmatova could say, "The Muse, my sister."

[highlights from New Yorker article - date?]

* * *
• It has been said ‘Dreams are pictures of the soul.’ If that is so, what are poems? And what, then, is the relationship between a poet and her/his body of work, and the larger society?

• “Where no vision is, the people perish.”

“That poetry matters to the people who write it,” says Dana Gioia, “has been shown by the ordeal of Soviet poet Irina Ratushinskaya... sentenced to prison for 3-1/2 years, she was given paper and pencil only twice a month to write letters to her husband and her parents and was not allowed to write anything else. Nevertheless, [she] composed more than 200 poems in her cell, engraving them with a burnt match in a bar of soap, then memorizing the lines. ‘I would read the poem and read it,’ she said, ‘until it was committed to memory--then with one washing of my hands, it would be gone.’”

[Poets & Writers Magazine, May/June 1998]

Sources:
New Yorker issue (TBA – date?) “Muse” article...
Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass, ” Penguin Classics, Edited by Malcolm Cowley
Michael Meyer, editor, “Poetry,” 2nd Edition, Bedford Books
Natalie Goldberg, “Wild Mind”
Poets & Writers Magazine, May/June 1998

2007-12-24T11:53:00.001-08:00

Albrecht Dürer

From Wikipedia

Albrecht Dürer
Self-Portrait (1500) by Albrecht Dürer, oil on board, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Birth name	Albrecht Dürer
Born	May 21, 1471(1471-05-21) Nuremberg, Germany
Died	April 6, 1528 (aged 56) Nuremberg, Germany
Nationality	German
Field	Printmaking, Painting
Famous works	Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) Melencolia I (1514) Dürer's Rhinoceros

Albrecht Dürer (pronounced [ˈalbʀɛçt ˈdyʀɐ]) (May 21, 1471 – April 6, 1528) was a German painter and mathematician. He was born and died in Nuremberg, Germany and is best known as one of the greatest creators of old master prints, along with Rembrandt and Goya. His prints were often executed in series, including the Apocalypse (1498) and his two series on the passion of Christ, the Great Passion (1498–1510) and the Little Passion (1510–1511). Dürer's best known individual engravings include Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514), which has been the subject of extensive analysis and speculation. His most iconic images are his woodcuts of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1497–1498) from the Apocalypse series, the "Rhinoceros", and numerous self-portraits in oils. Dürer probably did not cut his own woodblocks but employed a skilled carver who followed his drawings faithfully. He painted a number of religious works in oils and made many brilliant watercolours and drawings, which through modern reproductions are now perhaps his best known works.

His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Renaissance in Northern Europe ever since. His work reflected the apocalyptic spirit of his time, when famine, plague, and social and religious upheaval were common. He was sympathetic to the reform work of Martin Luther, who at Dürer's death wrote to a friend, "Affection bids us mourn for one who was the best."

Albrecht Durer's "Melencholia" - Waiting for Inspiration

2007-12-21T08:04:00.002-08:00

Albrecht Durer's engraving "Melencholia" is taken as the classic representation of melancholy. However, according to Wikipedia, "This engraving portrays melancholia as the state of waiting for inspiration to strike, and not necessarily as a depressive affliction."

According to Wikipedia,

"The name 'melancholia' comes from the old medical theory of the four humours: disease being caused by an imbalance in one or other of the four basic bodily fluids, or humours. Personality types were similarly determined by the dominant humour in a particular person. Melancholia was caused by an excess of black bile; hence the name, which means 'black bile' (Ancient Greek μελας, melas, "black", + χολη, kholé, "bile"); a person whose constitution tended to have a preponderance of black bile had a melancholic disposition. See also: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric

"Melancholia was described as a distinct disease with particular mental and physical symptoms as early as the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Hippocrates, in his Aphorisms, characterized all "fears and despondencies, if they last a long time" as being symptomatic of melancholia.

"The most extended treatment of melancholia comes from Robert Burton, whose The Anatomy of Melancholy treats the subject from both a literary and a medical perspective.
Burton wrote in the 16th century that music and dance were critical in treating mental illness, especially melancholia. In November 2006, Dr. Michael J. Crawford and his colleagues again found that music therapy helped the outcomes of Schizophrenic patients.

"A famous allegorical engraving by Albrecht Dürer is entitled Melencolia I. This engraving portrays melancholia as the state of waiting for inspiration to strike, and not necessarily as a depressive affliction. Amongst other allegorical symbols, the picture includes a magic square, and a truncated rhombohedron. The image in turn inspired a passage in The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson (B.V.), and, a few years later, a sonnet by Edward Dowden.

"The cult of melancholia

"During the early 17th century, a curious cultural and literary cult of melancholia arose in England. It was believed that religious uncertainties caused by the English Reformation and a greater attention being paid to issues of sin, damnation, and salvation, led to this effect.

"In music, the post-Elizabethan cult of melancholia is associated with John Dowland, whose motto was Semper Dowland, semper dolens. ("Always Dowland, always mourning.") The melancholy man, known to contemporaries as a "malcontent," is epitomized by Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet, the "Melancholy Dane." Another literary expression of this cultural mood comes from the death-obsessed later works of John Donne. Other major melancholic authors include Sir Thomas Browne, and Jeremy Taylor, whose Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and Holy Living and Holy Dying, respectively, contain extensive meditations on death.

"A similar phenomenon, though not under the same name, occurred during Romanticism, with such works as The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe or 'Ode on Melancholy' by John Keats.

"In the 20th century, much of the counterculture of modernism was fueled by comparable alienation and a sense of purposelessness called "anomie."

Cure For Melancholia - Melancholy Miscellany

2007-12-18T22:44:00.000-08:00

Zoloft, meditation, Janet Jackson, coffee enema, Munch & Mirror

A) “Was it the Zoloft, the meditation, the hikes, or the steady love, listening and faith of my family and friends that helped me through? Was it the acupuncture, the eight hours a night of medicated sleep? The anxiety management class on Wednesday nights, the yoga class on Thursdays, the warm days and brave light of spring?” --Meredith Maran, “Anatomy of Melancholy,” More Magazine, Dec. 07 – Jan. 08.

B) And then there’s P.J. O’Rourke’s NY Times review of Starbucked, A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine. O’Rourke writes, “I now possess the knowledge, of which I will never be rid, that Janet Jackson treated her chronic depression with a coffee enema.”

C) Or, the family dog offering comfort and reassurance,

Dog:

“I can out-think, out-work, out-fight any dog
in that world or in this.
Woof fuckin’ woof. I told you before, I’m here
To look after your father...”

(from "Dog Door to Heaven," God is in the Cracks)

D) Or,

BioTech,
MindSoothe,
ATP Acupuncture,
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy,
All Natural Supplements,

Highest concentrations of EPA
for optimal daily Omega 3 intake!

Lexapro, Homeopathy,

Chocolate, a Cure for Depression, study says, Scientists found that chocolate significantly improved the mood of people at risk of depression.

Is There a Cure for Depression? Right now there is no cure. Antidepressants correct the chemical imbalance only for the time you are taking them.

Applying electricity to the brain could relieve the symptoms of major depression and other brain disorders, say scientists.

Improved Health and Self-image Complete the Depression Cure. Following a healthy diet and lifestyle with the right amount of sleep, sunshine and exercise...

in progress...

Photo of family dog by Lynn Lundstrum Swanger (Louisiana Catahoula Leopard Dog)
& Munch/Mirror image courtesy Douglas McClellan