At IONs Institute, writing workshop

 We're perched on the steep northern slope of Mt. Burdell overlooking the Petaluma Valley watershed, the afternoon wind unfurls its sails & we glide with hawk minds in Ellery Akers' Writing Intensive to write paeans to the land.

California Poets in the Schools Science & Spirit Symposium, August 27-29, 2010

NOTE BENE: I've posted several of our CPITS symposiums on this page because traffic seems to direct to this page. The most current event is at the top of the page. Hopefully it isn't too confusing this way.

Write, Sing, and Move the Future 2013 at La Casa de Maria, Santa Barbara, August 23-25. Juan Felipe Hererra is poet-honoree.

California Poets in the Schools 2012

Passing the Gift Forward (click here to redirect to latest post)

Summer has arrived months late and with a vengeance

Summer has finally arrived in all its torpor. Flannel sheets off. Summer sheets on. Again. Hopefully this time, they won't jinx what's left of summer. Would someone in SF please do a little fog dance? A 50° temperature swing from frigid to fire in one day is a bit much. Now, if I put the flannel sheets back on, will the fog roll in? I don't DO triple-digit heat well. Friends posted that it's 117° in Palm Springs, 110° in Orinda, 106° in Santa Cruz, St. Helena, 105° in Sonora, 99° in SF, so how could it be 97° in Oakland— I think my Mac is lying. My outdoor thermometer gauge is split. It's either 40° or 120° Can't shake it down to recalibrate. Even BART is having trouble in the heat! SF BART  Delay Update: because of the heat, trackside equipment is acting up and trains are operating in a slower "manual" mode. Beijing's 60-mile long traffic jam enters Day 11—drivers advance 1/2 mile a day. Why doesn't everybody just back up and turn around? The air smells of smoke and carrion. Smoke is rolling over Grizzly Peak and Oakland Hills—150 acres. Now there's a fire on Mt. Diablo. Not good, this global warming. Gonna be an orange moon rising tonight.

from a Facebook post

Stomping spiders

I stomped a fat black spider to smithereens as I was mopping the kitchen floor—but it was a tiny escaped champagne grape. Foolishly, I thought: Aha! So this is how wine was invented! Obviously I need to mop the floor more often. Or drink more/less wine. And wear spectacles. Sigh! Someone asks, isn't it bad luck to kill a spider? But I was killing grapes! Besides, spiders Loooooooove me! They always want to truss me up and eat me. Right tasty. Trust me, I've been bitten by black widows, woodbine, and California’s answer to brown recluse spiders—this one looked like a crumbly version of a California recluse spider, so I stomped away like a logger at a hoedown.... my lower lip still flares up like a Zodiac raft—a decade later—from residual spider poison.

from a Facebook post

Very Odd Thought

Very Odd Thought:
I'm not as interested in history that occurs within 25 generations of living memory.
That makes me a… medievalist? An ostrich?

The New Zamizdat

OK, I must admit that I'm mesmerized by the new Blogger stats tool—in a shiny packratty sort of way. I am endlessly fascinated that I can now view what pieces are being read—how many readers, and what countries. Positively mind-blowing.

First, writing is a lonely business. Audience is a whole other hemisphere. Then there's the old saw: Who do you write for? Who are your readers? The publish or perish paradigm took off its kid cloves and flexed its knuckles and whistled, "hey kid 'comere!" when blogging was invented. Shades of Marshall McLuhan's Global Village.

I come from the American school of Samizdat or, rather, Tamizdat tradition. No, tamizdat is not a typo—as one well-intending publisher tried to correct one of my posts.

Russian samizdat, from samo- (self) + izdatelstvo (publishing house), from izdat (to publish). Coined facetiously on the model of Gosizdat (State Publishing House). (from AWAD)

Soviet samizdat was a form of illegal self-publishing in a seriously limited edition format, using ten layers of carbon paper plus ten sheets of clean paper—and an upright manual typewriter replete with a print ribbon you had to re-ink by hand. Typing through that many layers of paper was a real bitch. Weak ring finger strength equaled blurred "e"s in final copies. And pity the poor sot who was gifted copy #10—it was a bitch to the tenth power to read.

This is the underground tradition in which Soviet poetry (and secret texts including copies of Bibles) were painstakenly reproduced—and distributed, underground. I met one of Osip Mandelstahm's samizdat publishers in Leningrad, held a fragile copy in my hands—knowing that people risked their lives preserving his poetry. Mandelstahm & Blok's chapbooks still reeked of rancid printer's ink decades later.

Then there was the Leningrad Rock Opera singer Valera (aka Valery / Valeriy) Stupachenko - Валерий Ступаченко (who I did not marry because he loved his dead wife and God more than me—who could compete with that?) Valera treasured his dog-eared carbon-paper Bible. Cherished possessions from a time when religious worship too was illegal.