Stomach bug flattened me so I scanned photos instead

Advil. Check. Headache gone. Check. Tea. Breakfast. Check. I can do this. Check. What a difference a "down" week makes. Even if I was sick the entire week, I still got some good scanning time in.

Some Facebook collections of my newly scanned photos include:
Chris Caswell
Utah Phillips and Doc Watson, Rosalee Sorrells
Jack Mueller, national poetry week
Boschka Layton, SSU reading
Paul Mariah
Glenn Ingersoll
Lucille Clifton, Elizabeth Herron
Michael Daley
Poetry Flash event QR Hand, Sharon Doubiago
CPITS retreat Noyo River 1985
Edwin Drummond
Peter Capp
Cal Davis
Brownie Mary, Tony Serra
My family, Feather River 
Kitty Ward funeral 
Wake
My 30th birthday
My grandmother

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.

Maureen Hurley and C.E. Chaffin to read at Poetry & Pizza series, SF

Maureen Hurley

Storyteller, Celtic scholar, artist & poet, Maureen Hurley grew up in West Marin in Northern CA. Hurley holds an MA and a MFA in Creative Writing (poetry/ playwriting) from San Francisco State University, as well as a BA in Art Studio and Expressive Arts from Sonoma State University. As a graduate exchange student at UC Berkeley's Celtic Studies Department, she has studied anthropology, folklore and literature.

Working with California Poets-in-the-Schools and arts councils Maureen brings art and poetry to libraries, schools, prisons, retirement homes and hospitals. Besides magazine and web publication (check out her myspace page!), Maureen frequently performs her work, getting as far afield as Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival and the Cherkassy Library in the Ukraine.

C.E. Chaffin
A native Californian (now living in Mendocino County) C.E. Chaffin graduated from UCLA in 1976, winning the top honor award in English, The Edward Niles Hooker Award, though, he says, he was not an English major. Later he taught Family Medicine at UCI and was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Having retired from medical practice, Chaffin edited and published the literary ezine, The Melic Review. These days he keeps a blog, and teaches an online poetry course.

Spring '09 saw the publication of Unexpected Light (Diminuendo Press). Of the book’s poems poet & editor Seth Abramson says, “Here are words in service of integrity, poems in service of necessary revelations, and a poet in service of attention at its most elemental and unsettling."

Gate to benefit: California Poets in the Schools www.cpits.org

California Poets in the Schools is the largest writers-in-schools program in the nation. The program's primary focus is to encourage students to write, using their imagination, life experience, and special perceptions to create poetry. Poetry classes foster creativity, intuition and intellectual curiosity through the creative writing process.

Local Area Poet Coordinators administer the program, with a policy to place poets in schools in their own communities, often in their own immediate neighborhoods. Whether the school and community reflect an urban multicultural/bilingual population, a suburban environment or a rural farming area, CPITS has poets available who are of that community and familiar with its mores and values.

Poetry & Pizza is hosted by poet Glenn Ingersoll.
Glenn is a former student of Maureen Hurley And Zara Altair's.

Pizza is all-you-can-eat, poetry is priceless.

Escape from New York Pizza
333 Bush St (at Montgomery)
nearest BART is Montgomery Stn
nearest parking garage Sutter Stockton

7:30pm
$5 requested donation

links to maps:
http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://popizza.white.prohosting.com

Maureen Hurley & @cechaffin to read at Poetry & Pizza, Jun 5 @7:30 PM. $5 door to benefit: CA Poets in the Schools. Escape from NY Pizza, 333 Bush St,, SF. Pizza: all you can eat. Poetry: priceless! Glenn Ingersoll, host.

At Paul Mariah's memorial reading

At Paul Mariah's memorial reading, Jack and Adele Foley, Gene Ruggles, Mike Tuggle, Susan Kennedy, Noni Howard, Vernon Edgar, Herman Berlant, Jim Byrd, Michelle Bertrand, Earl LeClair, Leland Stoneys, Clive Matson, and Glenn Ingersoll. After the reading, we learned that Paul's archives will be sent to the University of Texas in Austin. Bob Berner's poetry workshops led to Minotaur, and ManRoot press. We head on over to Michelle's place with Mary Norbert Körte, Jim Byrd, Herman Berlandt, Vernon Edgar, and Eugene Ruggles—it's a small sendoff party. I was tired and depressed, was home by 9 PM, and asleep by 10:30 PM. I slept nearly 12 hours—like the dead, is it a residual flu, yet another confrontation with death, or the energy of too much people?

2/11 1996


Undated fragment:
Noni Howard said that I had a poem in The Parnassus of World Poets, which one? The day she told me that Paul Mariah died.

Letter to the Editor, Helen Ingersoll CPITS at Analy HS