Bio for anthologies

West Marin native who grew up on Coast Miwok lands, visual artist and poet, Maureen Hurley, is California Poets in the Schools Alameda County area coordinator, and former board member. She teaches poetry and art residencies in Bay Area schools, including Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley, and Alexander Valley School where she has taught poetry to kids for more than 30 years.

Recipient of numerous California Arts Council artist in schools grants, and other arts teaching grants and awards including nominations for the Golden Bell Award, and the Kawasaki Award. She has taught arts programming to students of all ages throughout California and beyond—including Montana, the Bahamas, Mexico, and the former USSR.

Maureen Hurley is a photographer and poet whose work has been widely published in print and in electronic anthologies. She has won several awards for her writing, she was nominated for Sonoma County Poet Laureate, and has several Pushcart nominations. Her photos are featured in an upcoming documentary on Berkeley street poet, Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit & Stone.

Her recent poems have appeared in Spectrum; Fly Like the Clouds of Time; The Freedom of New Beginnings: Poems of Witness and Vision from Sonoma County, California; Memories of Southern California; California Fire and Water; Our Lady of the Avenue; and the US Air Force’s Literature and the Arts.

END OF YEAR WRITING STATS 2022

Needless to say, I’ve long since blown right past the 4000 blog entries entries mark where I began the year. It’s now closer to 4500 entries. Because of revisiting and recording old journal entries, and using Facebook Memories, I’ve managed to garner dozens of posts lifted from Facebook comments that I had not posted before in this blog. It’s interesting to realize many FB comments are often the nascent beginnings of a poem. 

For example last year, in mid-December, 2021, for example, I only had 125 posts, and then, because of Facebook Memories, I was able to add more posts. Call it found art. For 2021, I eventually tallied 170 posts—that’s nearly 50 more posts. I thought I was not going to break the 125 posts mark either for 2022, but suddenly a rush of poems gave me 181 posts, with 90 poems and 28 prose poems written. 

Now I will need to revise that figure because I went through my latest writing journal whwich I am about to retire, for lack of pages, with a fine tooth, comb, and pulled up 10 more prose poems and non-fiction, leaving me with a total of 190 posts for the year. Wowza. Considering I began this stats analysis post with 125 entries, I'm stoked. 

The Isle of Staffa

In 2008, we sailed by the isle of Staffa from the Iona to Mull ferry and I was dumbstruck by the beauty of all that columnar basalt dressed in lichen, moss, and sea spray. I wanted to jump off the deck of the small ferry boat. Of course there was no time to backtrack and visit the island. 

Ours was a mad overnight run from Oban, courtesy of a newfound friend who scored us coveted ferry tickets for locals on an overbooked ferry. Driving down Mull from the wee village of Craignure to catch the Iona ferry at Fionnphort, we were late late late, so we barreled down the one-lane road like banshees along the glaciated Ross of Mull which took my breath away, such ragged beauty. 

Iona was extraordinary, on my bucket list for ages, My Irish grandmother, who inspired me to visit Iona, often talked about Iona and Tír na nÓg, the land of the ever-young, in the same breath—it was a whirlwind visit replete with several missed ferries, no place to stay, last minute reprieve, but then, it was over, we had to leave that singular beauty. 

In the new moon’s arms

“The new moon in the old moons arms” was something my grandmother always said to me whenever there was a sliver moon in the sky. So, of course, I was an inveterate word thief, and used it in a poem. But Sir Patrick Spens was probably the first to say it in print. Or rather the ballad about him. After a poetry reading at Garbo’s in Guerneville, Jim Montrose once pointed that out to me, and of course I was shocked, thinking I had thought the metaphor up all by myself, being newly arrived to the floodgates of poetry… And of course, Coleridge mentioned it in ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.’  (That’s not marinara sauce!) Then it all fell into place. My grandmother used to quote long passages from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to me when I was young. I was well steeped in the arms poetry, yet never knew it. 

REMEMBER

             —after Ron Padgett’s How to be Perfect

First, begin by getting out of bed earlier. 

No need to be a slug just because the pandemic is on. 

No excuses. We are not living in a bubble. 

It is important to get out 

of your nightclothes before 3 PM 

so that you have something to look forward to. 

Put a padlock on your bed if you have to.

Wash your bedding at least twice a month. 

No need to sleep like a man as my neighbor once said. 

Make sure you herd all those crumbs from the sheets. 

Don’t let them be like grains of sand at the beach. 

Speaking of beaches, when was the last time 

you actually went to the beach?

I mean really went to the beach, 

not a drive-by sighting, and got sand stuck 

in all those embarrassing nooks and crannies— 

like how are you did as a child, body surfing, 

impervious to the icy water. Why wait? 

There is only now.

Housesitting for KitaKat, journal

Because I was kitty sitting, I missed last Wednesdays, writing segment, I was too distracted, and besides, my pen was out of ink, and somehow, procrastination was my best friend. I thought that I would get back to it, but no. New house, new things to see. Oh look, shiny.

I also thought I would do all this scanning on memorabilia, so I hauled boxes of memorabilia down to Fremont with me. Nope. I didn’t have the focus. But I did read, or, rather, I tried to read a letter from Rosalind Sharpe Wall which mentioned the Cherry Foundation, dated 1986 and she had suggested that that I apply for money. And of course I never did.

Rosalind also mentioned that she was still working on her book that I helped to edit when she lived in Petaluma. It’s called Pioneers of of the Big Sur Coast, so that makes it a valuable letter to decipher as archival material, not that it said very much.

I expected to get back to my writing prompts next day, but it didn’t happen. What makes moving to a new location so distracting to the point of exhaustion? Here I am sleeping indoors these days. I’m not cold there’s central heating. I lack for nothing. I even have a kitty to pet.

Here’s the thing, for the first time in months, I’ve been sleeping indoors every night. Something I’m not used to. While I was sleeping outside during the fall, I was battling record cold temperatures. One night it got down to the high teens, all that cold sapped a lot of energy from me. As Sinead said, you’re in a warm dry place. enjoy it. True. So I caught up on a massive backlog of sleep deprivation that I didn’t know I had.

The town dog catcher

When I lived in Cotati, I lived next-door to the town dog catcher who kept wolves in his backyard. Moonlit nights, it was magical listening to them howl. Their pens stunk, all that raw meat. Like lion dung. I learned that you couldn’t look at the wolves, because staring directly into their mesmerizing yellow eyes was like looking too long at the sun, like moth to flame, because to see into their souls like that would be a challenge, and they’d bare their teeth lunge at the chain link fences, ready to rip your throat out. So I would sit on a step ladder and looked off to the side, watching them with my peripheral vision, and I listened to the wolves sing.

RECYCLE haiku

Thoughtful cat barfing
In her food bowl, saving it
For later. Repeat.

Cat regurgitates

breakfast in her food bowl

saving it for later.

 12/23

…..

Cat moons my zoom class, 

flashing her tail, covering 

the lens with her love.

Writing down the bones, 

she strokes the iPod, claiming

my words with her scent.

12/28

War, Literature & the Arts publication of War’s End (3 Days After Hiroshima)

At last, my Nagasaki poem appeared in the War, Literature & the Arts, an international journal of the humanities / Volume 34 / 2022, from the US Air Force. It was a long birthing process: two and a half years to be exact. And somehow strangely fitting that the Fall issue was published on the winter solstice, the coming of light. 

I don’t publish very often. But this was a wait of epic proportions. First there was Covid, then the editor retired, then the website died, and the web hosting site died as well, so the entire WLA magazine had to be reconstructed from scratch—so this is a brand new website. Thank you, editor Thomas Maguire. Perseverance furthers.

“In 1989 WLA was launched as a simple collection of six essays examining the nexus of culture, conflict, and war. More than three decades later, WLA continues its exploration through a growing range of creative genres. Artists of all types share wars' jagged and fragmented horrors alongside its provocative and captivating narratives.” 

When colleague Jane Hirshfield began to teach poetry workshops on the East Coast, I asked her why she was teaching poetry to West Point cadets, and she said they need poetry more than ever. So I took a page out of her book and submitted this poem to the US Air Force Academy, never dreaming they would take my poem. what a great solstice gift, considering the source of the light. I am Shiva.

Featured poet, John Balaban, with whom I shared a publication credit in the 1995 anthology, Atomic Ghost: Poets respond to the nuclear age, (his title poem, BTW), quoted WH Auden in his preface in WLA.

“The problem for a poet in writing about modern war is that, while he can only deal with events of which he has firsthand knowledge—invention, however imaginative, is bound to be fake—his poems must somehow transcend mere journalistic reportage.” 

Hopefully my poem transcends mere journalistic reportage.

Table of Contents and intro.

Maureen Hurley / War’s End (3 Days After Hiroshima) 

Here is my blog link with photo which they didn’t use.

At the last minute, I was asked to create an author’s note:

Author’s Note

Hurley’s uncles served in the army and navy; one built Liberty Ships at Marinship in Sausalito. Her father served in the Coast Guard, and a cousin, a mathematician, worked on the Manhattan Project. Her neighbor, a ship’s captain, was torpedoed in the Mekong Delta incident. She remembers ducking under her desk as atomic bombs were being detonated in Jackass Flats, NV. Her algebra teacher was Olympic runner and gold medalist Archie Williams, famed Tuskegee airman who trained fighter pilots.

These fragments of personal history inform her writing. Her poems have appeared in Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (Coffee House Press, 1995), and myriad periodicals. Hurley was co-editor of Tracks in the Widest Orbit: Collected Poems of J. H. Montrose (Russian River Writers’ Guild, 1985). Montrose, a WWII pilot, shared his observations of the Bikini Island nuclear tests with Hurley, and he told her how he flew over Japan dropping leaflets warning them of the Hiroshima bombing. Maureen grew up piecing together fragments of war stories. Poet Jane Hirshfield, who taught poetry to cadets at West Point Military Academy, suggested she submit her poems to journals that address war and its consequences

AT THE OLD PETALUMA BANK

The old Petaluma bank, once an antique emporium 

and before that, a real estate office, and a film house,

cleaned and scrubbed, is now an eyeglass store

filled with pricy lenses, so that we can peer into the past. 

A man with a paunch wanders in, curious, clears his throat, 

sings a Christmas carol, the bank embraces his voice, 

but when he hits the high notes his trousers drop, 

and the embarrassed song wanders off, collides 

with the vault of the ceiling, that much closer to God.

12/17-/28

SECRET ACROSTIC

I am the south wind 

moving among the egrets of summer 

who rise up and across the sky 

only to return to the east wind 

where everything is possible, even truth.

12/15 my acrostic word is secret, embedded. For Ms. Kosmos’ class, Malcolm X ES

MoSt NYWC poetry prompts

MoSt New Year’s writing challenge poetry prompts 1-20 Below are extremely annotated versions of the writing prompts. Go to the Modesto-Stanislas webpage to get the full instructions and sample poems. Otherwise you can sign up here.

Guilty pleasures

I was eating chocolate layer cake late at night, eating from the mother log. Just me and the cake. No knives or plates involved. The tines of the fork furrowed the sides of the cake like a plowed field, lifting the loamy frosting from the geologic layers of cake. Sowing my calories, I took time to sample the ganache frosting, letting it melt on my tongue like a molten flood, slipping down my throat like a mudflow, until I gagged under the sheer weight of all that chocolate, trying to figure out how to savor it, and coordinate the breath, the breath that couldn’t blow out a bonfire of imaginary candles, too many to count. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow the cake across the table. Enter a memory, a photograph. I was one, and the cake in front of me was an island in time, taking me on a journey of no return. My starfish hands covered with frosting, my face black as night and my eyes filled with stars.

12/15 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

Mother Thread

Before you became a bird, when you were earthbound, but the sky taunted you with the low clouds of escaped sunsets murmuring of empty seas, whispering of sailor’s delights. My grandmother said you were never quiet of this realm, always wanting to get to the other side—of what, we never knew. Perhaps the beveled edges of a clouded mirror. When reality became corseted, you traipsed off to distant horizons, but still, the darkness found you out. I was but a child. I had no words for the places you went, the people you met on the littered streets, that place where the fringes of humanity called home. When I was older, sometimes our worlds collided, we found a common ground that became a conversational thread, a place where memory and experience was topstitched into a quilt of longing and regret. A single feather drifts down from the clouds to land at my feet like a small oarless boat adrift on an empty sea.

12/14 Write On! Susie Terence

SNOWGEESE

I only saw the wild snowgeese migration once, while heading towards Mount Lassen to cross-country ski. As we rounded the bend, I was astounded by the beauty of snowgeese filling a muscular sky laden with the promise of snow, and the thunderous explosion of wings as they circled and landed on the molten gray mirror of an alpine lake. Apparently their idea of migration is really a group effort. The entire species congregates at one place at a time. Not a good strategy. I never knew that I was witnessing the entire population of a species on the brink of extinction. Only now, some 30 years later, are they making a comeback.

GUTTERED CANDLE

In my grandmother’s knotted hands, 

she held the sorrow and joy of a lifetime,

she held hope for the future locked

in the eyes of her grandchildren.

Those hands that tilled the soil, 

that harvested the fruit, shucked corn, 

skinned deer, plucked quail. I remember

the way she chopped wood, the heft of the axe,

how she banked the fire, the way she kept us safe.

She brought back the past, made it come alive—

all those old stories of the Ireland she left as a girl,

A time when people were closer to the land. 

She held the stories of the Otherworld, a record 

of when the old gods walked freely among us,

bringing dreams and mischief to the land.

Her mother lit the candle, as did her mother before her,

placing it in the window so that the ancestors 

could find their way home in the dark.

12/8

PICKING HUCKLEBERRIES

Come Labor Day, a trek to the coast, 

to our secret spot on the ridge where huckleberries 

waited for end-of-summer sunlight to sweeten and swell. 

When the coastal fog bank lifted,

the last rays of summer warmed the earth, 

the berries gave a last shout-out before the fall 

began its bone-chilling dance toward winter.

It was always a gamble to predict the ripening.

First to ripen were the smaller black ones, 

like beady eyes, laden with a pungent flavor, 

then the larger sweet blues, covered glaucous dreams. 

We’d pick those berries, plinking them into plastic milk jugs 

until the sun slipped over the edge of the the ocean. 

Cattle headed towards the barn as the last rays 

cast a mantle of vermilion light over the hills.

The song of distant coyotes, cattle called out to stragglers.

The edges of mist rose up from stock ponds

that glowed indigo and sparkled with stranded stars 

as if to witness earlier gatherings.

We hoarded our bounty, rolling berries on old towels, 

one by one, to remove the duff and leaf litter, 

until the white towels were stained purple as midnight.

We’d dream of huckleberry pies, and syrup over ice cream.

Our mouths, black maws, stained tongue and teeth, a badge.

There was no short cut, the cleaning always took longer 

than the picking, but more often than not,

our cache would soften and rot in Ziploc bags,

or turn to vinegar to dress the end of summer salads,

those vine-ripened tomatoes and basil,

hinting at the dank mossy breath of forest floor

covered with death, and the promise of ancient gatherings.

12/7/22 Write On! Susie Terence

In search of the Gorbals

The Gorbals was the ultimate slum of Glasgow, primarily settled by the famine Irish, Poles, and Russian Jews who worked in the shipyards, ironworks, weaving, and manufacturing factories during the Industrial Revolution. 

Probably the roughest neighborhood in all of Scotland, portions of the Gorbals were razed for the notorious substandard council flats, concrete towers during the 1960s, featured in a 2011 BBC exposé, were laden with serious structural defects, and rampant mold, etc., then replaced by the tony/ugly urban box renewal housing in the late 1990s-early 2000s, thus displacing literally everyone (90,000+) who lived there. 

I remember the plane circling Glasgow, 1972, the edifices grim, and streaked with coal dust. I never wanted that plane to land. That mean city. All that urban renewal merely traded one atrocity for another. Most of the blocks were leveled between 2000 to 2016. Then came the displacement. Now, the Gorbals houses about 9000 of the upwardly mobile in brutalist structures, but what happened to that writhing sea of humanity displaced by urban renewal? Where did they go, to East Kilbride?

I got to see a small section of what was left of the Gorbals in 2008. The Gorbals was famous for its ongoing flea markets. But, by then, most of the area was rubble rubble rubble everywhere. It looked like a bomb had been dropped. The novel, No Mean City (1935) is set in the Gorbals.

My friend’s father, Joe Hardstone, a talented musician, was born and raised in the Gorbals, it took a special ear to be able to understand what he said. He also spoke Russian and Yiddish with a Gorbals accent. I could understand him just fine because I was raised by my grandmother from southern Cork, Ireland. Joe/Isaac became one of the fastest sprinters in the Gorbals, outrunning the street gangs that lurked on every corner, with his violin under arm. 

Most of the famous Gorbalites were boxers and futba’ players on account of all that running. Perhaps the Gorbals most famous exports were the landed Irish who were murderers and gangsters. Jimmy Boyle, who murdered a gang member, switched careers and became a famous novelist and playwright while in prison. UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy grew up in the Gorbals. As did Sir Thomas Lipton, the teabag man, Allan Pinkerton, as in the detective agency, and Mickey Rooney’s Da. All Irish, I might add.

Mending the kilt