Home Ranch mentioned in Lander County line, Folklife in central Nevada, 1988

In the spring of 1985 we made a pilgrimage to the Walsh Home Ranch, where my grandmother first lived when she came to America. Her half-uncle, Paddy Walsh offered safe refuge for most of our family, who passed through the ranch at one point or another. Paddy became the single largest landowner in Lander County. When we first visited, I was surprised to discover the current Home Ranch owner, Jim Champie was cousins with folks I grew up with in Marin County. Mo Champie and Phil Bundschu were classmates of mine at Drake High School. He knew the names of our horses. Through him we also discovered another branch of the family we thought long lost. Apparently we were the only ones making pilgrimages to the ranch. I found this book far from home, while visiting a folklorist in the Sierra foothills.

• 
  
• Walsh Home Ranch early photos 1920
• Home Ranch, Reese River Valley
• Walsh Tombs: Photos
• HOME RANCH, 1985
• ELEGY FOR MARY WALSH
• WALSH folklore
• AVS notes: Nancy Walsh Estomba

Senator John Garamendi, CPITS Thank You letter, Sacramento Arts Day, 1988

CPITS writing workshop with Jorge Lujan 4/12/88

 CPITS writing workshop with Jorge Lujan 4/12/88

I am in my mother’s arms, the long sun in my eyes. I am mesmerized by her red lips and the jungle print of her flared skirt that later became a pillow for my grandmother’s couch. My jowls quiver with baby fat, my milk eye squinting in the sun, it’s Easter, I drool on my mother’s arms in the unbearably hot sun. By the same white car with its dusty blue top, where moments earlier my grandparents stood sternly gazing at the camera, all bright colors in my mind, all this fuss, my hand clutching red and green ribbons under my chin and I’m scratching scratching. I chew down on her arm and a rocking motion jiggles all the colors into a swirl. At the age of two, gazing out of this photograph, I see a woman older than my mother in a red dress, and an embroidered tapestry with mirrors. She is writing in a book and all those controlled marks that grown-ups call writing, I sweep my arms across the paper and tables making all this writing of lessons into vortexes. This woman has no children. Her grandmother is dead. She is much sadder than I can imagine. I have no words for this kind of sorrow that slips from her eyes in all the colors of the world like a river . She is in a classroom filled with children writing, a tall man sings poems about when he was five. There is not much difference between us, we are the same under the skin. She has collected many facts in her 35 years while I am a clean slate about to begin. 

• PHOTO ALBUM

CPITS Teaching journal, Jorge Lujan workshop suitcase words, photograph at 10

Jorge Luhan, who was our guest artist from Mexico, called this renaming lesson beautiful names. 

For example fox: the phoenix of the woods.

Moon: lost pearl from Saturn’s rings

Sun: high yellow spark that travels.

River: fleeting bluebird

My favorite was the student sample dragons: stoves on the run.

We made lists on the board and we combined the ideas.

It rained and all the names were lost. Ask the wind, you want me to do your work. Ask the fox but he danced. Ask the moon but it was cloudy. Ask the sun it was also cloudy. Ask the wind when you were so beautiful a hovering blue river of the sky redwoods, the sky on fire. wash your feet in the sea smooth lavender rocks, so warm, smooth rock in the hand of the earth in gods hands. Dusk: a forest on fire waiting for a visit from the moon. The wind took the names to the next village and the first poetic words were spoken, they were born. This is how poetry was born.

Jorge takes all the ideas and then tells us a story, a little boy and girl return return home to tell their mother: we have been moving the smooth blue river of the sky, where the trees were rockets to the sky, where the smooth lavender rocks were in gods hands and a forest was on fire waiting to visit the moon.

My definitions:  Marsh: sky catcher of sunset where wild geese squabble and sing in their floating nests. Candle: with its burning eye piercing the night of false dawn. Jasper: a bleeding stone of crushed embers from the first fires. Breeze: a fire roaring in the pines with no flame at all.

Metaphor is discovering the mysteries of the New World around us. Write a poem containing the four sentences from your definitions ask yourself what kind of water, involve the elements, give lots of details.

Senator Jim Nielson CPITS Thank You letter, Sacramento Arts Day, 1988

VENUS UNEARTHED

It was an unusually dry year in 1820 when the
farmer's plow hit a stone in the fallow field of Melos.
Thinking it was a building block to salvage,
Theodore Kentortaus wrested from the earth
the object of perfect love.

When he pulled the goddess Aphrodite (or Venus)
from the shallow grave, he fell in love,
spent an unmeasured amount of time in his shed
gazing upon her beauty, 'til his wife, jealous,
sold her to the French. Was it the maddening April winds
or the vestiges of an older story
that fanned her rage?

When Venus was hoisted onto the French frigate
she saw the sea was curved like a bell,
she escaped into the water. Her white arms
were lost when the sailors tried to raise her
from Posideon's watery depths.
Some say it was because she didn't want to leave Greece.
A fisherman fell in love with her,
gathered up her pitiful broken arms,
rowed far out into the Aegean and tossed them overboard
so she would always embrace the boats of the fishermen.

Men searched the sea in vain for her arms,
unable to find the watery X the fisherman marked.
Now, only fish gaze upon the beauty of her white arms:
one hand holding the hard-won golden apple of discord 
the other gathering up her robes as she received
the judgement of Paris. Hera's final revenge—
a skirmish broke out between the French and Germans.
A stray shot chipping a piece from the face of Venus,

mutilating the immortal beauty that Paris claimed.

4/1/1988
rev. 3/89

Notes on my poem, Venus Unearthed, or what John calls poet’s work

Since I am working back in time I write backwards in my notebook. Perverse, I know but I wound up gathering much more information than I had pages left in one section of my journal—which later caused confusion when I tried to revisit it later. I thought the Venus notes would take a couple of pages, and then I could save the rest for poetry. Alas I filled the entire section with notes. What started out as a simple OED hunt became a day-long adventure. In other words, instead of writing a poem, I lost an entire day in a dictionary. I didn’t know I’d find so much information, I found the entire Greek pantheon. And one thing led to another. I followed every lead. After spending six hours looking up this information, who begat who and who murdered who, how they’re all related to each other, that they all had ulterior motives to do each other in. I guess the best revenge in this case, is not just living well, but outliving your enemies and their progeny, and so on. adds a whole new meaning to the term, the sins of the father, or mother.

All this legwork and I don’t have the energy to finish the poem. But, as John said, it’s all poets work. Like the time I spent the day memorizing the poem Innisfree by Yeats because I was missing my grandmother.

RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY outake

RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY OUTAKES

1. If word processing is possible
with only a limited memory,
how many rams does it take to equal one rom?
If I work in total darkness
will my eyes reflect the phosphor tubes
or will I pass for a feral night animal
hunting under the cover of darkness
for prehistoric prey in a literate world?

Is there total enlightenment at the end of the screen
or is the dark worse than the byte?
Ram Ram Ram Ram


2. The ultimate dada experience:
to write the manuscript of a lifetime
on a floppy disk, not make a hard copy,
and then run a magnet across it.
The ferrous molecules will line up
and attain perfect enlightenment.
Ram Dass Baba Ram Hass
Bob Doss Ram Baba peach flambé.

4/88? 89?

when was this first written? was filed in 1980, I think that's a typo
from newspaper clippings
WOOFITIBOOTAH

Oh dear, this is rather striking too close to home.

RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY is MIA (hard copy)
(See Hidden Logic)

I found a hard copy of RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY, two versions, actually... no date, but v.1. is dot matrix, so 87 is probably correct.