Me and Dana Teen Lomax CPITS

Me and Dana Teen Lomax, Presidio, David Sibbit's office, CPITS event

CPITS workshop on pocket poems. She won the lavender. It looks like a pot plant.

Dana was my CPITS protégée, I trained her during the 1980s at Mark West School in Santa Rosa, where I had my California Arts Council grants. Poet-teaching became her life's work. Though I've trained many CPITS poets, if I had only one person to choose to pay it forward, it would be Dana.

added 4/24/2016

MIGRATION

              —for Bruce Moody

After the poetry reading, we sit on the balcony
it's sultry for November, real earthquake weather.
The lights of the new bridge glaze the bay
and the train hugging the shore wends its way
along the narrows, sounding a two-chord jazz note.
The frosted pink C&H sign sweetens an indigo sky.
We offer pinot grigio toasts, catching-up with the years,
myriad stars and the Big Dipper whirl above our heads.
Bruce asks, if you had a billion dollars,
where would you go? Not what would you buy.
Death will discharge our debts.
On the far shore of the Carquinez Straits
the new houses ring the hills like fireflies.
Mesmerized by their own beauty

they crowd the shore, a thirsty herd of wildebeasts

waiting for a sacrificial leader to take the plunge
into dangerous waters and force them into the drink.
Perhaps an earthquake will do.

WHY DID THE TOURIST CROSS THE ROAD?

Yearning for another time
we strutted along Petaluma Boulevard,
once the chicken capitol of the world,
and clucked fuck-fuck-fuck-AFF
to a startled gaggle of tourists
aimlessly clogging the sidewalk.
We arm-wrestled them down
to the ground with our eyes.
Reclaimed our turf, and moved on.

Halloween 2010, Petaluma

11/14/2010

Remembering John Prine's Brother at Garbo's

Chicago Sun Times columnist and movie critic, Roger Ebert, wrote "John Prine is the poet of my life. People say he's great, but he's a lot better than that." I recommend reading Roger Ebert's Journal, a column he originally wrote in 1970, "John Prine: American Legend—A Singing Mailman Who Delivers a Powerful Message in a Few Words."

(Ebert's also updated the original story by posting some great John Prine YouTube links. The " Angel From Montgomery" backstory is worth the price of admission.) Bob Dylan once said "Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism." I concur.

I have an interesting John Prine segue too via his brother. Circa 1980, John Prine's brother played John's songs for drinks at our Russian River Writers' Guild Monday Nite Poetry & Prose Reading series at Garbo's bar in Guernewood Park, CA. That's how I first learned to really listen to the words of John Prine's songs as poetry.

Ironically, it was songs—Irish ballads that first led me to writing. But that's another story. Prine always had such good angst-riddled lines: "You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness...How can you ask about tomorrow?" My kind of lines. I was living in a perpetually warped möbius strip time.

(In the 1980s, we were living under a dark cloud: many of the gay club owners who housed our poetry venues were succumbing to a mysterious disease. Nobody knew what it was. Or its name. But we personally knew the names of the fallen: Peter Pender, the pianist/gold medal figure skater, bridge/chess champ who owned Fife's Resort with partner Hugh Ross, Stumptown Annie's owner, decorated Vietnam Purple Heart veteran, Leonard Matlovich, the first gay man to "come out" while in the military—was no longer looking like Kevin Spacey. It was too much to bear.

There was also my neighbor, handsome Bill Dutra, the original Marlboro Man, his beautiful face ravaged... Note Bene: I can't find info on Bill on the internet but he may have been Christian Haren. The info on Christian (or Chuck) fits—he owned The Chocolate Factory in Guerneville. But I can't find a photo.

Bill showed me an old tear sheet photo of him as the Marlboro Man—which I recognized. Bill told us amazing stories of being an actor, working with John Wayne—how I found out Dr. Kildare was gay—and stories of Key West. So all the pieces fit—just not the name of the Castro Street Cowboy.

I could have confabulated the name—but I've an uncanny memory for details. Whoa! Now I've segued so far from my story, I'm even scaring myself. So sorry. Another story, another time. (The Russian River basin attracted many Hollywood types, Fred MacMurray, Raymond Burr, Irene Dailey all lived in its watershed.)

My personal John Prine favorites were the songs that had recently made the charts. I loved "Paradise," but we all called it " Daddy Won'tcha Take me Back to Muhlenberg County," a song Prine says he wrote for his father. There's some good backstory video on the song here.

When I was a senior in high school in 1969, the town of Paradise, in Muhlenburg County, was drowned by the floodwaters of the Green River when a dam was erected, so barges could get to the Peabody coal fields. All about progress.

BUKOWSKI IN ORANGE

Ever notice how the really orange cats, the ones with the tiger stripes tend to be male? I know, this is supposed to be about the Buk. Bukowski was orange. Nothing to rhyme with that. Savior's a nuisance to live with at home as Joan Baez once said. Not that I lived with him. I was living out of my car at the time. A rusted blue VW Bug. Bukowski was crashing on a friend's couch at a farmhouse by the railroad tracks in Cotati. I was running the poetry center, trying to hide my backstory. Bukowski wanted to lasso a reading but he was always drunk on cheap red wine by 3 PM, and he stank of stale cigarettes. I was recovering from an illness and they called me a China doll, taunting me as they grabbed at me as if in jest because I was pale & wan. Little did they know I was near death's door. Anorexic. An abortion gone south. A river of blood raged in a flood tide. Redredred. The edges of the world closing in. My periphery darkened before the clamping down. And the will to live had something to do with it. But they saw my slender self as desirable. And so they, showing their stripes, grabbed at life, grabbed at me, but I was dead inside. I felt lucky to make it back outside‚ gasping for breath, I doubled over. Puking in the weeds. An orange cat frantically wove his way between my ankles as if to shackle me too. But it was a clear fall day, facing south, the sunshine cradling me. That was before Rohnert Park overran Cotati and there were still vast tracts of adobe fields and blankets of oat hay surrounding the campus. George Rohnert's seed flower beds bloomed in wide ribbons of pink and red. Waiting for the harvest, fields wrapped like a present.

RANDOM NOMADS

RANDOM NOMADS

A painter of hollyhocks

constellations

a treatise of light 

where the laws of departure 

collided with mirrored chaos

 an apricot cloak across the sky 

but a departure of words 

ceaselessly scraping against 

the drama of ink.

Random nomads
A purgatory of treatises
whisper about the pleasures of the heart
a eulogy of delicate pointillism. 

So we have the words
we must shake them out of our heads. 

11/6/2010

Susan Wooldridge workshop

IF I WAS

If I was a container
I would hold the stars closer
If I was a source of light
I would burn at absolute zero
I'd be a constellation of chaos
I would write treatises of surrender
I would be a purgatory of fire
I would whisper an elegy of delicate smoke
against a horizon of bleakness

We need Joycean words to hibernate our shadow souls
Sometimes the words just start writing themselves
Sometimes we're just stuck inside  our own heads.

NICHTALALLOUDI

She was a painter of night-blooming flowers
She made color: apricot, tangerine, cerise

swirling around a dervish of bright pollen.
There was something profound about that act,
the brush spiraling in towards the center like a dancer.
Dawn was a treatise of light, a constellation of fire.
The lake mirrored the feathered cloak of the sky.
It was a departure of worlds, a murmur of words
ceaselessly scraped against a dark drama of ink.
Sometimes the poems just started writing themselves.
She was mesmerized. There was no turning back.

11/6/2010

BALANCE

I am without flagrant words
the family transports 6 million pieces
of angst into every room, the hearth
I am not a bittersweet song of iron tracks
the oncoming train, or stunning constellations
a silver center deep in the mines
or a lone candle by the river
I am the forgotten pointallism
the ears of night listening to blue piano notes
I am the river of singing stones
I am the Apúrimac, while the Andes wept
an ancient glacier of rhythms melting
into dry sobs of the coming summer.

11/6/10

When in Rome freewrite

When in Rome, and… an elipsis following a trail, breadcrumbs for the birds. A trick? When in Rome, the idea is to follow the customs of another culture. The culture of birds following a trail, the trap, or the Trojan horse? The cat, anticipating fresh meat, wiggles her haunches like a track star brandishing her cleats. She waits, anticipates trajectories and potential outcomes. Don't tell me cats can't plan ahead. The successful hunter requires mathematics and timing. The cat is a quantum dancer ... Oh, hell the breadcrumbs have led me astray. I am following a cold trail because Rome wasn't built in a day, nor did it fall in a day either. The system continued on for hundreds of years after the fall with no one at the helm, I might add, sort of like today. The politicians fiddle and burn, and combust at absolute apoplexy. We follow the Spanish customs and then look at what happens. Yeah when in Rome, it never left us. We carried the Capitoline burden into the second millennium without missing a beat. We are our own Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Moors simultaneously tearing down the infrastructure of our civilization well shoring up the bastions of hope. When in Rome, do as you would, and to others. To the other, take those aphorisms and drop kick them over the fence and let them drown in the pond of regret and despair.

11/5/2010 Writers' Group

Gold star voting badge

In response to the prompt of a Facebook badge, I snarled, I voted days ago, OK? And I don't need no stinkin' badge to prove it.

Zana Darrow said: My dad held on to "Bohemian" as a descriptive for a long time. When we settled into the San Anselmo house for his project building BART, he knew we would probably stay for awhile. That we would not be living like bohemians anymore. We had been moving every 2 yrs or so. When I came to WI the summer of 70, I was labled a hippie. Just being from CA got you that, In the 90's the competition called me the hippy realtor.

Ken Bullock said: Bohemian. That one may go back to the Middle Ages ... but it essentially meant living like a student, a protracted adolescence. "Hippie" originally meant a white guy trying to act like a black hipster ... a derisive diminutive.

I said, Ah but you were a svelt young waif in 1970, Zana! No hips at all! It doesn't mean that we didn't absorb some of the hippie lifestyle, we were native northern Californians, and therefore, not hippies—who came from elsewhere—primarily NY or LA by way of NY.

Centa Theresa said: You are kind of a farmer/hippie/bohemian poet type, yet completely unique. Are you sure you didn't grow up in Berkeley?

I replied, Born in SF, and grew up in West Marin with the cows. We were a little too young to be true hippies! I was in high school during the Summer of Love. I wasn't a hippie—wrong income bracket/social class. Poor immigrant family. Irish Victorian era roots.

I just hate this Facebook badge thing. Reminds me of why I didn't like school. I'm like Ferdinand the bull seeing red with all these Facebook badges (in general). I appreciate the sentiment, I hate the concept.

Zana said: I ignore that stuff. I don't trust it. How about a gold star? I am waiting for my daughter to get moving so we can go vote together.