Cybernalia

What stands between my self and my e-self is a blog, a bit of cyber-literatia, or maybe cyber-inventia—maybe dementia—something I've resisted. A gimped knee has me web bound, Resistance is futile. The time is present. No time like...

Like the Beat poet Bobby Kaufman, it's as if I took a ten-year vow of silence, but the trance was merely a purgatorial haven or hell of my own creation. Initially, I blamed the silence on a near-fatal car accident (no, my life did not flash before my eyes), or I blamed the silence on grad school. Someone said they quit writing poetry in grad school. It burns it right out of you. With my MFA thesis's seven-year grace period about to expire, I know that one all to well.

But it comes down to this: who am I writing to and what for? The what for is what haunts me. Nihilism raises its ugly head.

Everything is post 2001 now. My old voice has fled, a victim of the mujadeen or the al Queda. Tired of writing about lovers gone bad (BTDT, been there, done that, the tee shirt is a holy rag or more like a holy cow), I grew weary of the rhetoric that inevitably follows writing with a political stance, I turned inward and with a number two pencil eraser, began to erase the inner markings, the deliniations of the soul, that force which drives us to create, to send our prodigal names out there into the world. But even that imploded.

At first, I was physically exhausted from a near-fatal car accident in June of 1997. I hadn't counted on the post-traumatic stress lasting for so long. Or my brain to go south for an extended winter. But I found that a punctured lung weakens more than the breath —for breath, the source of inspiration, is the root of creativity. Not as in God has breathed into, In-spire as in spiritus, but not sanctus. I'm a recovered Catholic enrolled in a two-step program sacred and profane.

Then it was onto to grad school to waken my slothful brain. I was fulfilling a decade old dream. And then I took the deepening vow of poverty a la Dante's Inferno–a poet and a student replete with student loans. Which was followed by a rebuilding of a life, such as it was. A decade of reinvention of the self from Ground Zero has led me back to my first fragile love, art. Poetry has gone on holiday. All that's left are the unformed stories.

And so, couch-bound by a bum knee and stuck in time present, I began to surf. I surfed my name to see how I fared during that decade of near silence and I was surprised to see that I actually had a web presence, though I'd never actively sought one. In fact, I shunned it. All my co writers and classmates were deep into the publish or perish frenzy while I was happy listing in the doledrums. (Been there, done that. Even seeing my name in print no longer inspires or thrills the way it once did. In my 30s and 40s, I was driven by a dark ambition.)

Fooled into thinking I'd find the time later to do what I want—all those big, unnameable projects looming on the horizon—but the horizon is dressed in death's robes and the passage of time is akin to snake-wrestling with cobras. Spit in your eye. Leave you with a Homeric blindness and no story to tell. Life and relationships have a way of taking over. It comes down to who does the housework. Who does the dishes, or scrubs the toilet. Poor Sylvia Plath, I'm beginning to understand her dark fascination with the oven. Did Ted Hughes metamorphose into the sly fox of art and escape domestic responsibility in order to achieve a fragile immortality of words?

But even now, I am afraid to let my cybernalia loose into the world, This blogless blog is bogged down in its aimlessness. Shiftless. No point of view. No goal. Who will read it? And why? Get a job. Going to the bog. Full of shyte. Call it initiation. Baptism. Begin. Regardless. Or take the anywhere approach and see the music of what happens.

Poets Mike Tuggle and Sharon Doubiago each said to write the stories down, you're a storyteller, I said no to that, thinking my stories weren't worth much. But then I said no to poetry too and perversely, it said yes to me, then shamelessly ran off with a lover. I don't know where. I don't have a burning urge to file a missing poems report. But I have to finish my MFA theses. Write anything. See where it leads. Jilted prose redux is what promises to follow during these august daze.



© 2007 Maureen Hurley
NOTE BENE) This blog post was indeed written in August 2007, but I had so much revised and new material to upload there was a logjam so I reorganized the blogs as I had created this site in January and then forgot about it. There was all this perfectly good cyberspace going to waste and I found that I could move the files around by date. And so I did. Since most of it is older work being revised, it really isn't date specific. So I opted for the genre approach. It's still evolving but Feb-Mar is early memory stuff, April is poetry month, May is mostly USSR stuff, July is reserved for my many MFA plays and monologues... then it's sort of calendar specific. I imagine it will keep evolving and shifting until I find an organic order. Drive the Technorati spiders crazy I suppose.

Guy Kawasaki says to write a blog like it's a book, good advice but the physics of it are all wrong as people stumbling upon it are not going to begin at the beginning. They'll either join in by subject matter or by newest entry...no way to read a book. SO there's no chronological attempt. Merely thematic.



To see some of my art go to
Maureen Hurley at MySpace.

Mike Tuggle on By Request

I found some notes in my journal on Mike Tuggle, I was probably an MC and was introducing him to a reading because I asked him the usual, when and where he was born etc., 1938, Tulsa. And we got distracted. I asked him why he always closed his set with that By Request song, and where did he learn it from. Mike said he learned it from his Pa, in Oklahoma. He said, when I was little, my dad and mom didn’t have a radio, but they would sing songs in the car. And the last song he’d always sing was always By Request.  It was an absurd and scary song, the idea of Josephus, an academic was. It’s absurd and final and funny. Ending on cholera by request. It made me remember the song on the brevity of life. It made me think—is that all there is? He said his grandfather was part Choctaw, and Lula was half Cherokee. But my grandpa on the European side was an Indian hater, big ham of a man who invented the first Gott cooler, a large thermos and he sold his idea to Gott’s department for $100. He invented the double-ended wrench for fuselage on airplanes. JW Tuggle married Martha J Booth. JW looked a lot like me as a young man. Edwin Booth was an actor, and he did a great Hamlet. But it was Junius Brutus Booth, not a relative, who sang the folk song and passed it on.

• Folklore Parody song to tune of Auld Lang Syne
• Note, this is filed in 2001, but I didn’t finish it until 2014, but it made more sense to file it with the other folklore.

Folklore Parody song to tune of Auld Lang Syne

Genre: Folk Song (parody?)
Mike Tuggle, male, 60s
poet and painter
American, born in Oklahoma
Nov 30, 2001
Cazadero CA (residence)
JOSEPHUS & BOHUNKUS
(Sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne)

There was a father had two sons
and these two sons were brothers.
Josephus was the name of one,
Bohunkus was the other.

Now these two boys to college went
for reasons quite specific.
Josephus was religious bent
Bohunkus, scientific.

Now these two boys are dead and gone.
Long may their ashes rest.
Josephus of the cholera died.
Bohunkus, by request.

I first heard Mike Tuggle sing this song to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, at a poetry reading he was giving in 1980, in Sonoma County, Ca. Since then, I have heard him sing it at dozens of readings; it’s become somewhat of a trademark of his. And though I’ve sung the song to many others over the years, no one else seems to have heard of it, nor is it in any of my songbooks including my Irwin Silber Songbook, and my Alan Lomax folk song collections.

Mike said that his father taught it to him when they lived in Oklahoma, and that it was passed down through the family. Mike is Irish-American and Cherokee descent. He thinks it’s a folk history of sorts, modeled after a real event. I agree. I think there was also a middle verse with mules too.

I like to sing the song, because there’s more of it than first meets the eye. Even though it has a biting, moral tone, it offers an interesting world view. Given that the song is at least 75 to 100 years old, it refers back to an earlier era, perhaps the early 1800s, and the idea of both brothers going to college would have seemed unusual (and expensive) for midwesterners. (It turns up as a college song in at least two midwestern colleges).

It doesn’t strike me as a particularly eastern song, it seems to fit within the cowboy lament genre, even though one brother is a scientist and the other, a preacher/scholar. And the fact that they’re cremated seems a bit fantastic. Most songs—laments of the funereal genre, like The Streets of Loredo—tend to have coffins and graves in them. I like the irony of the last stanza, whether they were good or bad, they both still died in the end.

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.

Sonoma County Community Foundation arts fellowship award

Sonoma Salute to the Arts, poetry readings 6/90

The Paper’s Summer arts issue: Attuned to the Land

The West County Muse

Attuned to the land

POETRY

BY SUSAN KENNEDY

Photo by Maureen Hurley

POETS AMUSING THEMSELVES at the 13th annual Hart Crane Birthday Party (Crane was born 101 years ago, July 21. Left to right: west County writers Ann Erickson, Betty Garrett, Gail King, Hunce Voelcker, Pat Nolan and Paul Mariah.

Forestville poet Maureen Hurley describes her writing as ‘Formed by the bending of land along the fault line where I’ve lived all my life, where, if you put your ribs to the ground in the yellow summer grass, you can almost hear the earth shifting.”

Maureen Hurley, Forestville ("I am a landscape poet; I paint images with words"):

IN MARY BIANCHI'S GARDEN

Cazadero Academy 3rd annual benefit reading, date?

 

Mike Tuggle at 50, by Tom Roth, Dec 18, 1988

RRWG, CPITS student reading, Burbank Activity Center

Cazadero benefit poetry reading for the Cazadero Academy (art)

10/18  Cazadero benefit poetry reading for the Cazadero Academy.

Readers include myself, Mike Tuggle, Susan Kennedy, John Oliver Simon, Richard Garcia, Pam Singer, and Stephen Torre. Not everybody was on the flyer. It turned into a marathon. Bill Witherup, Michael Syles, Jim Dodge.

I very much like Stephen Torre's work. I think he would make a good guest artist for my CAC project. This poem about logging on the Navarro River is incredible. He's the lumberjack I was looking for.

87 or 88?

NAMING MYSELF

NAMING MYSELF

Lost in memory, 
I wander in the jungle 
like Eve in the garden, 
green tendrils caress my ankles. 
Plumaria, fragrant blossoms  
beneath my heel. 
The essence of honey and lemon, 
sweet frangipani.
Parrot feathers in the air, 
raucous blooms in the jungle.

6/1985 
Mike Tuggle CPITS workshop
Mark West School

RRWG reading at the Burbank Activity Center with Maureen Hurley, Mike Tuggle, Susan Kennedy

Obligatory Hug, Dec. 1984, Russian River Writers' Guild

Obligatory Hug, June, 1984, Russian River Writers' Guild, Maureen Hurley

Poet sketches, Marin Poetry Center, 1982, James Broughton, Nanos Valadritis, Charles Entrekin, Luke Breit, Mike Tuggle, unknown,

 

To Joan Hotchkiss

Creamery Creek travels to the San Geronimo Valley, 

becomes Lagunitas, then Papermill Creek. 

Where it enters Tomales Bay, 

silver, salmon, spawn in cow shit 

at White House Bend. 

This creek, an artery through the valley 

follows the veins of my arms 

to the heart of things.
Pumping liquid through the valley, 

overturned stones.
My uncle caught a pregnant salmon with a pitchfork. 

Their roe floated through the gash 

down the stream where the name changes, 

but not the creek: 

Creamery, Papermill, Lagunitas. 

Fed by tributaries: Arroyo, Carson, Crystal Springs.

Silt feeds orchids,, azaleas, and huckleberries.

Myself, bareback. My horse plunging through pools, 

her back, a floating carpet of red fur 

against the sparkling water.
I grabbed hold of her tail 

and am towed to the opposite shore

2/6/82
This becomes 

• CREAMERY CREEK

.