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

Shout out from Sharon Doubiago on the publication of Hard Country

I wasn’t expecting a Facebook shout-out from poet Sharon Doubiago, for triggering the events for the publication of Hard Country. But, thanks.

Sharon Doubiago wrote to John Crawford:

“In 1980 two poet friends, Maureen Hurley and I think Leonard Cirino took my manuscript Hard Country, to Meridel LeSueur who was teaching at the annual 2-week poetry symposium in Port Townsend Washington. Copper Canyon Press of Pt. Townsend had enthusiastically accepted it but now was making sexual demands "or no publication." I took my ms from him. Meridel said "I've waited all my life for this book and before I die I'm going to get it published." And she did by taking the ms. to John Crawford of West End Press. Upon reading it he accepted it. Thus began my publishing career (which, as with some of my longtime poet friends as good as any of the superstars, might not have ever happened—writing poetry and getting published are 2 entirely different—in many ways contradictory—endeavors). West End was in Minneapolis as was Meridel. John was wonderful. He founded his press in the West End bar across the street from Columbia University in New York where Jack Kerouac, et al, had hung out and subsequently poets, writers and students. John was a great human being of great integrity and subsequently a great publisher. He never, not even slight hints, demanded what Copper Canyon had. Nor did he require extensive rewriting, changes or cuts to my 264-page poem. Instead he created a 6 female poets committee as editors. An issue rose about the Native American poems in Hard Country, whether a poem about the history of the U.S. by a "white woman" was politically incorrect. It was the great poet, the Native American Joy Harjo, who gave the okay. While in the publication process John came to San Francisco to meet with me, took me to the Basque Hotel/Restaurant in the alley across from what is now the Beatnik Museum, and over dinner educated me in the contemporary political Basque situation. Most awesomely he took me to the Marina apartment of the great poet George Oppen and wife. At least twice he brought me to Minneapolis, for final proofing and readings. He shared with me in several visits and letters his disastrous marriage with a Southern California woman named Sharon. He warned me to never take personally any confusion he might make with my name! He told me this several times! When published he made great connections and readings for Hard Country. When West End moved to Albuquerque he published a second edition. I last saw him there. He picked me up at Margaret Randall’s house and took me to his house which was packed with boxes of West End’s other publications. When he retired West End he sent me the remaining Hard Country copies at no cost to me. In publishing Hard Country he made possible all the rest of my life, all my further publications.  He made possible my poet’s life. He made possible the hope of a great America.  Thank you, mucho gracias, merci beaucoup, shukrin  John Crawford, Love Sharon (the one who loves you).”

https://www.facebook.com/547040818/posts/10156315981285819/

Preserving the past: Centrum in the early 1980s (photo)

In the process of using old Facebook Memories to flush out the gaps in my blog, I discovered that I had met Meridel LeSueur, not in 1981, but according to the Centrum site, it was 1980. I will need to readjust many (undated) poem dates...

Not only that, as I attempted to fill in the gaps on this timeline, I discovered that I've been misspelling Meridel's last name for decades. It's LeSueur, not LeSeuer!!! Got that. Awg, egg on face. Blame it on dyslexia. (True—I had a hard time unraveling it—even now, when I knew it was wrong and I had to resort to a snapshot of her name to keep it right in my head.)

As to fluffing out this blog, the trouble is, my Facebook Memories only date back to 2009. So it doesn't help flush out those impoverished writing years. I'm still sorting old papers, so more work is coming, but the bulk of the poetry has been scanned and posted (a huge task). Now it's come down to transcribing old journal entries. (Not the highest on my priorities list, of sorting all my old papers, filing them, and eventually dispatching them.)

The year 1980 is particularly dicey in that I didn't seem to keep a proper journal. Napkins, paper place-mats and menus were pressed into service, along with carbon paper separator tissue, as well as the backs of old posters and poem revisions—an odd sleuthy way to date my many undated old poems.
 
So, I must've gone to Centrum three times. I know we were personae non gratae for crashing the gates of the kingdom when Meridel was there. Carol Jane Bangs in particular had it out for me. She actually chased me out of a poetry reading, screaming bloody murder, the only thing missing in that lunatic chase, was a cleaver in her hand. No matter that it was free and open to the public. Luckily she never knew my name. The nerve. Crashing a poetry reading/reception like that. I was an alley cat, hungry for poetry. Perhaps the free wine and hors d'oeuvres were involved as well. 

Jim Heynen, one of the other Centrum coordinators, apologized to me later. He didn't mind at all that I was there as a freeloader. We spiced up the conference. Jim read a hysterical poem about someone using false teeth to make the scallops on a pie crust, and hog farmer David Lee read from The Porcine Legacy. Worth the gate crashing entrance fee.

Writing at Centrum

1980 (I remember meeting Lisel Mueller, and Bill Knott as well as Donald Hall; I think this is the year I met Bill Root and Pan Uschek, and Rusty North.) 

FACULTY: Galway Kinnell, Meridel LeSueur, Richard Shelton, Ann Standork, James Bertolino, Madeline DeFrees, Donald Hall, Sam Hamill, Bill Ransom, Lisel Mueller, Bill Knot.

1981 (I'm pretty certain I went to this one too as I have a journal entry on Jack Cady; and I spent time with Tree Swenson and Kathleene over at Copper Canyon Press. Kathleene West (what was her last name back then. I adored her. I found out that Linnerson was her maiden name, she said she was always reinventing herself. Anyway, she got me to apply to teach poetry to kids in Montana.) 

FACULTY: Margaret Atwood, Robert Haas, William Matthews, Sam Hamill, Tree Swenson, Leslie Marmon Silko, William Stafford, Jack Cady, Jane Yolen. 

 

1982  (I know that I went to this one too, I remember singing and drinking with Tess and Ray at the Town Tavern (note to self: don't try to keep up with them drinking); I fell head over heels in love with Thomas McGrath. I remember him reading from his imaginary letters, wow, and his talking about coal mines.)

FACULTY: Olga Broumas, Henry Carlile, Sandra McPherson, Carolyn Forché, Tess Gallagher, Sam Hamill, Paul Hansen, Jim Heynen, Thomas McGrath, Richard Shelton, James Laughlin, Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish.

This photo engendered an interesting conversation on June, 2013, which was worth preserving in situ.
Facebook conversation (photo) Lyle Daggett & me on Bukowski, Black Sparrow Press, Doubiago

And another much shorter version of this post was filed July 10, 1980, for continuity's sake.
Port Townsend Poetry Conference 1980 (photo)

Facebook conversation (photo) Lyle Daggett & me on Bukowski, Black Sparrow Press, Doubiago

This was too good a Facebook thread to toss.

Long ago, and far away, at the Port Townsend Poetry Conference 1980. I was with Sharon Doubiago, Linda Macaluso, Tobey Kaplan, and Leonard Cirino. In this photo I'm listening to Meridel LeSueur, sitting on the floor at her feet. Her daughter Deborah LeSueur took the photo with my camera. I found it much later among some old slides. We crashed the Centrum conference—oh, how they tried to bust us, and Meridel said, “the California poets stay or I go.” Jane Bangs, whose middle name was spite, backed down fast. But then she spent the rest of the conference vociferously bad-mouthing us, and generally making our lives miserable. We were sleeping in the empty dorms, she had the janitors lock the doors, so we had no place to stay. We wound up sleeping on the beach in our sleeping bags. But it was the full moon, and then the tide came in, nearly floating us away. But the upshot was that Sharon Doubiago read from her new ms, Hard Country—it got published, and the rest is history. Meridel said, "I've waited all my life for this book and before I die I'm going to get it published."

Shout out from Sharon Doubiago on the publication of Hard Country.

Poet Leonard Cirino (1943-2012)

         Most of my life I’ve been poor,

          I never lived in a house with gables.

          This year I’ll grow flowers.

          The movements change hour by hour.

                  —from The Moments Change, Leonard Cirino

I found out via a small Facebook comment posted by Crawdad Nelson that poet Leonard Cirino had died. I had no idea that Leonard was even ill. I was out of the loop and I'm completely stunned. No one thought to contact me—not Lee Perron, Claire Josefine, nor Crawdad Nelson. Donna Champion, who was in constant contact with Leonard, knew he was sick, but not the dying part. No Leonard-flavored instruction manual. He didn't tell Donna the news either—and we were among the ones who knew him the longest.

Apparently it was a quick diagnosis on January 23, Leonard's liver cancer had spread like wildfire. Leonard was given six months to wrap it up. Instead, he got only six weeks. Barely enough time to say hello to death, let alone, goodbye to life. According to his Facebook page, he said he wanted another 15-20 years more. He literally ran out of time.

So I am gleaning the web for links to Leonard in case others too didn't get the news. It may be a bit of a chaotic collection here but at least it's a start.

An Italian-American native of the San Gabriel Valley, east of LA, Leonard John Cirino was born 11 September 1943 and died 9 March 2012, in Springfield, OR. During the early 1960s, Leonard was a state champion pole vaulter in high school and in college. Leonard attended UC Berkeley during the FSM days—where he said his real education began. He tuned in, turned on and dropped out and did the Timothy Leary thing. Moved back to the land. Tried to clean up. Speed took its mordida. Went crazy. Was institutionalized for a horrific, violent crime. I remember the sun stood still the day he told me the news. It was a litmus test of faith. A watershed of loyalty.

Leonard was paroled in 1975. Rehabilitated, then repatriated. He reenrolled in college, and picked up where he left off. Leonard graduated from Sonona State University in 1978 and moved to Albion Ridge, in Mendocino, where he earned his keep as a jack-of-all-trades: landscape laborer, carpenter, solar specialist, a news reporter, and dishwasher. Writing all the while.

About that same time Leonard was at Sonoma State (circa 1976-78) I met him through Lee Perron and Donna Champion. I was organizing readings at Sonoma State. We hit it off like long-lost kin. Maybe it was an Irish-Italian thing, We had the same saints queued up along the portico. We knew when to genuflect.

Loba Equinox

Sounds of mother nature collide midair, it's Ostara, spring. The sound of of man dominates the 21st century. Nature takes a backseat. No wolves howl at the equinox moon. We drive up 880 along the bay and it's a postcard perfect day out there. Beauty times beauty is equal to itself. But we are all safely tucked inside our little boxes like tins of Christmas cookies. Conversation fills the a car, floods the space between the man-made, engines running, relentless tires. Nature is holed up, offshore, locked in a vault, with a Swiss number. We can't hear her speak. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin authorized the killing of hundreds more wolves. Today guns ricochet across the tundra, and echo on our back streets. Sharon writes of how old Lupe, at age 16, shuffles arthritically down the street. And everyone stops to admire and pet her. The well-heeled and homeless alike. They want to know what breed. She doesn't tell them. Loba, loba, loba—or beauty will be diminished. Thunder on the horizon.

3/21/2009 

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.

CPITS 2006, AT THE COUNTY FAIR

REGENERATIVE WRITING —with Tobey Kaplan


AT THE COUNTY FAIR
—for Sharon Doubiago

The carnival straddled a limnal boundary
between civilization & endless fields of corn.
A miracle in the bright dust and mirrored lake
deep summer bloomed in cotton candy colors.
For a moment she was screaming,
& laughing against a bright sky
as the Fairest Wheel lifted her
weightless against the burden
of her father’s darkness.

In a constant elegy of ascent & death,
the Fairest Wheel dizzied them up to the stars,
& plunged them in o the dwarfed laps of broken families.
For a moment, she forgot she lived
the enchanted sleep of Snow White
where in dreams she rode a carousel pony.
Between her clenched teeth, not a rose,
but a blanket emitted a high-pitched sound
as a bright bloom escaped from her gown.

As she loosened herself from the horizon,
she was forever tumbling against a silken sky.
Her blonde hair, a temporary sun
eclipsed & eclipsing the retextured sunlight.

For a moment she forgot what she was
becoming, a black dahlia.
Dust & parched earth. You could taste it
in the air, acrid like carbolic soap & sweat.
Soon the rains would come.

—Maureen Hurley
Walker Creek Ranch, 10/15.2006

MAUREEN HURLEY who grew up in the wilds of West Marin, a watershed away from Walker Creek, was Area Coordinator for Sonoma County for a decade, at present, she’s learning her urban skills in on the shores of Lake Merrit in Oakland. Published in the 2006 CPITS statewide anthology


GENERATIVE WRITING
From Thoreau, TC Boyle. Oates, Wright, Merrill, etc.

We were observing
Replacing the old style cells
In which a window
Measuring 6 x 8 feet
More movement there
Perhaps I was not thinking coherently
In this state I was careless
Their faces showed consternation
I was confused, so I smiled

The color drained out of the treetops
It was like looking up at the emerging stats
But who was counting
For a long while she didn’t say anything
I don’t know what’s wrong with me
He foresaw every disaster so no was on his lips
Listen he said, speaking tot the sky
The spilled paint of stars
Softened his voice

I won’t give anyone another chance
It’s been a long dance with death
I realized that I’m possibly quite mad.
I know he is.
The world is full of people
separated from themselves by families
What was her favorite song.,
the name of the lover she took to the grave
I never adopt a person who doesn’t have

In the case of numbers
It allowed me a substitution
The trouble with Mike was
We had become middle class
But our dog had not
They turned towards us as if praying
She believed he betrayed mongrel origins

We were all, in all places
A picture of Brazilia,
a white mansion shining in the jungle
The music is powerful, blessed
In this fine white afternoon
Paying no attention\to our own little brick utopia
Sort & discard
The heavy-footed building
A lazy reach & sigh
These are the papers I need
It begins to thin in the air at dusk
The one, a poet, the other an action.


PERSONA WORKSHOP
MARGINALIA After Jarrell

I had started to walk down the path
These are the roads you find yourself traveling
Homesick for anything, she asked me in her windswept voice
Occasions for the grief that left me seething at the sea
She heard a lot of it when she came home from the hospital
Help me! The pain in her bones paralyzed me
So I wrote these words in the margins

Memoir

At Celia Woloch's reading at Cody's Books, Sharon Doubiago says she's writing a 900-page single space memoir and I'm afraid of anything longer than a thousand words. She wears golden butterflies on her ankles—curious signs of slavery and freedom. She's living in Berkeley now. Three weeks. It must be a record. But the road is an old lover.

1/9/05
added,rev. 9/17

Celia Woloch's reading at Cody's 1/9/2005

Celia opens her reading at Cody's Bookstore, as an homage to Sharon Doubiago's Hard Country. She read a poem called Late, she says she undressing the idea of choosing to be lovely by wearing an earring as a talisman.

She reads a pantoum about being bareback and how the woods were on fire we rode towards the flame with the sky and our mouths close to that danger, a list poem. She read My Mother's Birds. Sucha was a nickname, she raised chickens. Chocka was the sound of chickens and also the sound of the ax falling. She said, We could escape unlike the chickens.

Blink a child's tattered self-image: being called wool-lock, chink-eye, Saint Cecilia, here is how the world turns on itself, a girl...

Apres la Luna Miel, a love poem the, moon of honey, the sky of milk. Naming the hypothetical children and escaping from them. She does a play on slow children at play, a dyslexic moment, something I know too well. 

Another poem The Passionate Suitcase, for her Gypsy sisters. I believe the moon blink, the traffic of leaving then the night slams shut. Don't look back.

She reads from Tsigani, a book-length poem. My friend Ken Bullock and Celia took another epic Budapest train ride, which led to the poem I knew snippets of the story, then I hear the Gypsy history interpliced. The what if poem… what if I had no documents, no country… While waking into the dream of Budapest, my name in his throat like a jewel. 

Dien dobre, Polish for good morning. Celia told a story of how she was robbed, no passport. Someone said something about selling her to the gypsies, with no proof of country. I had grown thin on a diet of grief, consonants lost between languages. The neighbor, worn as a blade, eggs in his hands. Djen—day: eat what is offered in that light.

Proposals: Happy Independence Day another list poem. I don't know who'd who they think I am dressed in rags of wind with eyes of green fire.

Doren Robins says there's a tenuousness in Celia's poetry. Segue to Sholeh Wolpe, born in Persia, who said who said 10% of the people will never kill, 10% will always kill, the rest of us who will go either way. Then a reference to Hotel Rwanda, the idea of distancing oneself from the current governments of the oppressive. What one man will do to another. 

The Persian culture is now flourishing. But women get the raw end of the deal. They serve men. Condoleezza Rice is a two-man army on her own. In their writing and art they continue to serve men. Bomblets, not leisure, but sperm. Muslim fighters are given a key to heaven to paradise. The idea of the virgin paradise is sewn into his father's pants. Words have no need for light, they shine on their own. 

Afterwards we all go out for a meal at an Ethiopian restaurant and talk until the restaurant closes. The foggy night tightens its prison issue blanket about our shoulders.

Letter to Michael Kettner, Catalyst

Dear Michael Kettner,

I noticed that you're selling a book I'm published in, under Abebooks.com. I'd completely forgotten about it...and AD Wynans...Migawd! How did you obtain a copy of the book? Would you like me to sign it to increase its value? Hahah. Um, what poem DO I have in it?

Maureen Hurley

CATALYST #17: 3nd ANNUAL EROTICA ISSUE
Bookseller: M. Kettner and Son, Booksellers
Contact: Michael Kettner
Address: M. Kettner and Son, Booksellers, 1501 NE 68th, Seattle, WA, U.S.A., 98115
E-mail: mkettnerbooks@juno.com
Phone #: 206-323-7268

Dear Maureen, 

How nice to hear from you again. Lest you have forgotten, i was the publisher of said CATALYST. Have taken a few years off writing to insure i have retirement income - to set up an on-line book biz specializing in poetry and sm. pr. stuff. Only have a few dozen of Catalyst 19 left, and since so popular, am selling them one by one on line;

Your contribution to #19 was a graphic, "self-portrait". thanks for offering to sign a copy. however with periodicals, there is little value enhancement with signatures unless multiple contributors do so or if signed by editor or famous person. in the case of erotica, the mere fact it is erotica, is usually enough. 

You did receive a copy or two of #19, did you not? don't remember you being on list of copies returned with no forwarding address. check out my list on ABE by clicking on booksellers. have over 1500 sm. pr. titles on line with at least as many to go. also have large list of general titles since it's hard to make a living on poetry alone. if you ever want to sell off part of your poetry collection, let me know. 

Take Care, M.

In a message dated 8/28/04 12:24:34 PM, mkettnerbooks@juno.com writes:
<< if you ever want to sell off part of your poetry collection, >>

Hi Michael,

I've been thinking about it for ages, the books just sitting in my cabin in Forestville, some rare ones at that. And correspondence. Robert Bly/ Calliope Press...I put on that event at SSU. Lotta work & little gratis from himself.

Lee Perron--do you know him? also got into the rare book business--along with John McBride...who, if I have the story right, was laif off after 25 years from Moe's Books on Telegraph--recession, a sign of the times. As our friend Ken Bullock said, hell of a time to try & sell books. How are you doing with it? Are you still publishing journals? I did look at my resume and Catalyst is indeed listed--way back in the 1980s.

Ach, the book signing, It was merely a ploy to say hi via cyberspace...your name rang a bell, and certainly, Seattle....I'm trying to put a face/event/place to your name as I'm certain that we met...in SF? Or Port Townsend? I'm excellent with faces, even after 20 years...when & where? Obviously you've got my drawing, it must be a self portrait...

Gawd it's been a right long while since that epic journey we took north from Mendocino: Sharon Doubiago, Leonard Cirino, Tobey Kaplan, myself and Moonlight the Alsatian shepherd, in a white station wagon named Roses. An anarchy of northern California poets crashed the Port Townsend Writers' Conference...Carol Jane Banks was having apoplexy right, left & center.

We were all sleeping on the beach, one full moon night, the tide came in and nearly swept us away. Leonard was floating around in his down bag like a cork. Bill Knott was living in a big Victorian on the bluff with Pamela Uschuk (sp)?, we spent a couple of nights on the porch. We later found some barracks that were open after that. CJ Bangs was trying to get us bounced out of the conference but we were like bad pennies. Meridel LeSueur took to us, said we stayed or else and that was that.

Meridel took Sharon under her wing, and that was the start of something, all right. I kept out of the way, feeling like a poetry impostor, and years later, Meridel was asking me why I stayed away so long, was I mad at her...by then it was too late for a prodigal daughter.

I remember Ray Carver, a long cool drink of, er...uisge beatha, chainsmoking and we were all singing Irish songs at some bar with Tess Gallagher... and Michael Daley. Empty Bowl. And Marina Albert...putting us up. All these names bubbling up. it was a spur of the moment event that irrevocably changed my life, somehow I always thought it would continue like that, mad confabs of poets...but then long distances of time and isolation set in.

After finally breaking it off w / John Oliver Simon, I wound up in the USSR doing a poetry & art exchange. It was there I began to translate the Soviet poets. I ran into Marina in Moscow, we were both living in Leningrad with crazy Soviet singers. We'd hoard our dimes and meet at the Seagull Cafe on Nyevsky Prospect, we'd pay an outrageous sum (a week's wages for some) for lattes, worth every penny. 

One time we met Mendelstahm's publisher, it was Glasnost and there was hope. He brought his samizdat publications out of hiding and we held a piece of history. For that one publication he could've been killed. In Moscow, I saw Akhmatova's frail sister feeding pigeons in the snow. But I had to let go of Russia in order to survive. I came back to the States.

I did get to Poetry International in Rotterdam a couple of times, and was in on the Breytenbach translation project...with the likes of Holub, Heaney, Dove...I was onto something, in that I loved the process of translation, then I was nearly killed in 1997, a car accident, and with the shock and healing and all that, poetry sort of left me. I still write, but not with the fervor of the past. Dabbling in prose too, but what's a dyslexic to do with linear thought? After the accident I went back to school and got a MA/MFA at SFSU, w/ a side of Celtic studies at UC Berkekey. Did some playwriting too. But I blather on...

Maureen

Hey Maureen, 

no, 12 years of publishing was enough for me. still writing. on-line is the way to go with book biz these days. more one has on line, the more you make. been learning on-line biz from a couple of the masters here in seattle. left Kathleen after 23 years a couple revolutions about the sun ago. tough at first but had to be done. 

quit job of 16 years and decided to set myself up so i'd never have to work for someone again. just write and sell books. if your poetry collection is anything like mine, i'm very interested if you truly want to sell. i'm just getting past initial years of set-up and debt management it takes to get going and could probably work something out as autumn progresses. 

glad to hear you've recovered. the writing impulse is fragile. been observing it in others for years, studying, if you will, how to maintain it and have it thrive. not easy to do, especially as one ages and life's vicissitudes work on one. have to get ready for work (at Horizon Books). talk to you again soon. -M. P.S. No, we have never met. You were in town once but we didn't hook-up, if i remember correctly.

Take Care, M.

Teaching Notes: Mendocino Woodlands Journal: translations, rainy day women

Mendocino Woodlands, October 6, 1995

Twenty years ago, my first boyfriend, Bob Hamilton turned me towards the bay window of Zachim's Gallery on Main Street, placed nasturtiums and yellow calendula beneath my chin, tilted my rainhat back, turned me towards my reflection in the window, and said, This is how you will look at 40 or 50. We will come back and remember this day.

I couldn't imagine my life without him, for I still believed in love. The gray sea reflected in the window, but his potters thumbs were already molding the clay of my belly. I stood in front of that bay window, and inhaled the punishing odor of nasturtiums in autumn. The sea practiced nuances of turquoise and jade beneath a cloudy sky.

Two decades later, I stand in front of that same bay window and remember what was said, and not said. In the bookstore, I take solace in fingering the book spines in the poetry section, just seeing the names of all my friends in print is comforting. I am homesick, but there is nothing much to return home to.

The other night I told Karin Faulkner I was homesick. I am teaching nearly 200 teenagers from Windsor poetry and silk painting at the Mendocino Woodlands.

Karin's presence, dinner and a beer helped to settle me. The bartender treated us at the pub. Karin and I go out to see Dangerous Minds in Fort Bragg and we are weeping, Do not go gentle. Karin said, We poets are always on the edge of tears.

I understand my students better after the movie, and regain some center by sleeping at her cabin. The last time I slept here in the pygmy forest, years ago, was with Oleg from the Ukraine.

I walk the Mendocino Headlands, no use walking the streets, I have no use for most of what fills the stores. I am not a tourist. I pass the Mendocino Hotel, and remember nights at the bar, where we all gathered after readings and talked about poetry until closing. Sharon Doubiago, Leonard Cirino, Bill Bradd, Jesse River, Devereau Baker, and Tom Robedeaux. Time was more gentle then.

I still want to sip coffee at the Café Beaujolais, but The Loft bookstore, an converted water tower, is now a bakery. Once, at The Loft, Leonard, Tom and I read poems on the crazily tilting floor. Poets are already a bit tilted, so it mattered not.

Leonard Cirino is well represented in the bookstore. I heard Tom Robideaux and Devereaux Baker split up and she went to Texas. Tom, I don't know where he went.

The For Sale sign, another death knell to the past. None of us can afford most of what's's being sold in the shops. As if poetry automatically carried its silent vow of poverty like a prayer flag against the wind. Mendocino's become too rich for most blood. People support new Irish knit sweaters with no patina of age, no shiny cuffs.

Once we lived along this coast like gypsies, sleeping within speaking distance of the ocean. We were part of the migration of artisans that began in the 1960s. The pygmy forest became our bed. Once we came up to help Sasha Makovkin unload his kiln, followed by a wild party of roast goat and vodka toasts as we baptized the new dinnerware fresh from the inferno.

Did that all really happen to me? It's as if memory itself had become fiction. And I could have forgotten all about it, and the sea caves in the middle of the bluff. but I drew a picture of it so I know I was there.

The masculine sea is pounding punishing the earth's vulva. The sheer drop into the sea astounds me. A prophylactic package is wedged in a groove on the fence railing. Why not here? I am envious of someone else's orgasms as if it still lingered in the salt air.


Walking the headlands, a poem is stuck, so alone, so lonely, yet so lovely. A breechbirth. I find myself looking for Sharon Doubiago's blue van, but it's no longer summer, she's headed up the coast.

Already I am rubbing shoulders with memory, the ghost haunting me. My eyes are doing funny things, I can only see the town as it was nearly a quarter of a century ago. The gallery where we once read poetry.

Sharon Doubiago's hair, like golden wings engulfing her face. And how her son, Danny stood there in front of their small cabin, just out of high school about to go off and play football for the Dallas Cowboys that bronze golden-haired manchild, and his slender sister, Shawn standing shyly behind him, deerlike, a carbon copy clone of her mother.

Memory is tricky for it tends to want to tell a story other than its own, and we are left with disembodied images. Ghosts.

And I am remembering the ones who stayed lost, how my childhood friend came here to lick her wounds, and raise a child. She was a friend from when horses came before boys, but later, the drugs took the reins. That all happened before the summer of love. She followed the bands who shaped the substance of a decade.

Karin's voice still seeps in from some of the old readings we gave at the McCallum House. We were the rainy day women: Karin Faulkner, Sharon Doubiago, Robin Rule, Cindy Frank, Mary Norbert Körte, Judith Tannembaum, and Marnie Purple. We were the poets lending our mellifluous voices to the wind.

Hunger gnaws at me but I deny myself food. The full moon is pulling on my blood, ambivalence choking my will. This place of uneasiness unleashes a savage, untamed and wordless poetry. 

Overburdened by memory, I am unable to capture what was said, what was remembered. Everything is always in translation. Even poetry.

Too Bright to See

Poet Linda Gregg grew up down the hill from me, on the next ridge over, Tamal Road, which was on top of a hill above my great-aunt Ellen Budjick's cottage in Forest Knolls.

We used to sneak through the Gregg’s Forest Farm Summer Camp on our donkeys because that was the only shortcut to get to Tamal Road from the Barbano's Lagunitas Summer Camp. We'd ride a wide loop back up into the hills where Forest Farm Camp winter-pastured their horses and then we'd traverse the final ridges homeward in darkness.

Forest Farms Camp is the same place where Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead died. But by that point, the summer camp had transformed into a rehab place with a different name: Serenity Knolls Chemical Dependency Center.

Jerry Garcia was personally responsible for record sales of Ben & Jerry's ice cream at the Forest Knolls store. But heroin didn't kill Jerry. Despite his daily walk down the hill to the store, his heart just gave out. I'm sure the ice cream didn't help the diabetes any either. The Godfather of acid rock was dead at 53.

Seems Forest Farm Camp was always a troubled place. Janis Joplin lived on Arroyo Road at Barbano's Lagunitas Summer Camp with Big Brother and the Holding Company—but that's another story to tell....

In the 40s and 50s and into the early 60s (before the economic crash happened), Forest Farm Summer Camp was a pretty radical co-ed summer camp for inner city kids who were pretty much like Martians to us.

We thought it was a weird, if interesting concept for kids to go to Forest Farm Summer Camp. So did the FBI. (In those days, most summer camps were not co-ed, nor were they such a strange admixture of kids from all walks of life—sort of a mini-United Nations).

Anyway, varying shades of McCarthyism colored a rosy hue over our little valley so the FBI was interested in several families.

We locals were definitely not welcome at Forest Farm Camp at any time which upped the ante during the summer months when we'd sneak through camp on our slow-dreaming donkeys and have staredowns with the camp kids from New York—it was as if we were in a bad spaghetti western with a thin plot. They were big, bad and ugly.

But Brenda Fullick who leased her Icelandic pony, Helgar from the Greggs after summer camp was over, liked to sneak in a visit to see Helgar who hated the city slickers on his back. He was a one-girl pony. And Brenda was his girl. Whenever he saw her, he'd buck off his rider and come over to wicker a hello.

We had a strange notion that we were invisible on our long-eared mounts, lost in the resulting meleé, because everybody else was on horseback too. The Gregg girls never finked on us or told us to leave. Only Old Man Gregg would chase us off like vermin.

I remember Old Man Gregg, I thought he was the most dour man alive. He'd just as soon bite your head off rather than give you the time of day.

Ironic in that they'd taken refuge in Forest Knolls, far from the claws of McCarthyism, like many Valley folk. Then they too shunned everyone.

Mrs. Gregg was kinder, she was a local, who grew up in Petaluma, but the Anglo Saxon Presbyterians kept themselves separate from us Catholics. The Troubles of Northern Ireland were so deeply ingrained, the distance lent itself to generations. You were marked at the church door.

When Jack and Claire Felson took over Forest Farms Camp from 1966-1976, it became a kinder, gentler, more inclusive place that invited participation from Valley folks. But by that time I was long gone, chasing the wind over some distant horizon.

Poetry reading at Markey’s Cafe with Sharon Doubiago, Andy Clausen, Maureen Hurley

While Reading Essays by Robert Hass

Dear Ones: This old post from 1987 languished for years, literally unread—and suddenly I have an audience, I don't know why, but thank you for stopping by. A little Blogger stats sleuthing uncovered Ron Siliman's blog as a redirect. I am thrilled that Ron mentioned it. Over the moon. But puzzled as there is no mention or link anywhere on his most excellent blog. Or why this particular blog piece—as it's merely an old journal entry, not literary criticism. Ah. the vagaries of the internet. Dear Reader, thank you for stopping by. Feel free to drop me a note via comments. I won't publish them if you don't want them published. I'm dyin' to know how you arrived here in this remote corner of cyberspace—Maureen Hurley 4/29/12

One April Fool's Day, circa 1985, I was reading a book of new essays, "Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry," by Robert Hass (Ecco Press—a well-respected independent New York press, now an imprint of HarperCollins), but his riverine metaphors contained so many geographic errors, I completely forgot what the poetic point of the essays was. What kind of joke was this?

No typo, the 140-mile-long Truckee River was suddenly emptying out at the headwaters of Lake Tahoe and switching directions mid-stream by running down along I-80 into the Pacific Ocean instead of dying in the alkali sump of Nevada's Pyramid Lake—remnant of prehistoric Lake Lahontan? And my natal West Marin watershed, Lagunitas Creek, was apparently running uphill into the Nicasio Valley instead of by Camp Taylor to Tomales Bay.

At least my grandfather's summer neighbor, Kenneth Rexroth, who had a cabin near China House in Lagunitas, knew which way the creek ran:

Under the second moon the Salmon come,   up Tomales Bay, by Papermill Creek,   up the narrow gorges to their spawning beds in Devil’s Gulch.

I was far too shy to to say anything to Bob at the time, but poet Sharon Doubiago said, You must write what you know to be true—even if it's hard, or rubs against the grain. It is the poet's job to get the facts right. Besides, it was the fragile beauty of the West Marin landscape that led me to the art of poetry.

So, afraid of the commitment to prose, I scribbled a few dyslexic notes I didn't know what to do with, typed it up, transferred it to my old Apple IIc, and forgot about it— until now, some 20 years later, when prose no longer frightens me off with its insistent tyranny of syntax and logic, and an injured knee is keeping me flattened and couchbound.

A friend gave me a pile of old software with a translator tool that allowed me to (sort of) access the archived floppy disks that imprisoned most of my early work by way of obsolescence, which made my enforced immobility more bearable.

Though I had many opportunities over the years to mention the error to Bob, I never did summon up the courage to tell him that both watersheds would have to defy gravity and run uphill—the Truckee River whould have to reroute itself and climb out of the Tahoe Basin over Donner Pass (even the Donner Party ran into some trouble at the pass), and my own Lagunitas or Papermill Creek would be forced to leap its bed from one valley, and defy gravity to traverse the next valley to Tomales Bay.

Now, Bob Hass grew up in San Rafael, so he should have known where Lagunitas Creek emptied, but then he didn't spend any time in Lagunitas Creek. Not like me.
***

It was a bit ironic, if not poetic justice, that Bob was instrumental in the creation of the eco-poetic Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival. The last time I read at Watershed, we began with a medicine wheel and a drumming circle at Strawberry Creek at the bottom of the UC Berkeley campus.

Someone (was it my ex, John Oliver Simon?) read some Lew Welch poems, then traced the route of the undeground creek to Martin Luther King Jr. Park in front of City Hall. With a clear view down to the bay, at least Bob couldn't get the creek direction wrong here.

We straddled the millennium with poetry readings, we daylighted Strawberry Creek. Kush of Cloudhouse, who was filming the event, dropped a mike down the manhole cover in the midde of the plaza and the miked creek was allowed to speak in silverine during the readings. Our students read their River of Words poems to the music of the creek.

It was a glorious day—even if Bob got my name wrong and announced to the world that I was Maureen Heaney. Ironic, one of my grandmothers was a Heaney, a fact which once caused Seamus Himself and I to declare ourselves cousins after a tot or two of uisce beatha in an elevator.

Ironic also that Bob now lives near the mouth of Lagunitas Creek, a few miles from White House Bend in Inverness. I wonder if anyone ever told him, or if he ever corrected the error when the book was republished by HarperCollins?
***

But back to my story: the name of Papermill creek changes according to history and whim and usage. We locals called it all Lagunitas Creek. I know where Lagunitas, or Papermill Creek empties. At one time or another, I've ridden, swum, and fished most of the entire 20-mile length of the creek from what we called its headwaters in Woodacre. (The topo maps differ from our collective knowledge, calling it San Geronimo Creek, with Lagunitas headwaters arising on the north slopes of Mt. Tam. My uncles called that creek out of Alpine Dam the Cataracts and the Great Carson, not Lagunitas. Outsiders are changing our collective oral history with printed maps.)

Whatever you want to call it, Papermill Creek, or Arroyo de San Geronimo, traverses to Olema and Point Reyes, to its final destination, Tomales Bay. I've traversed most of it, except for one last stretch at Tocaloma, to the Gravel Pits, to Point Reyes—a missed opportunity—but the new landowners are possessed by the idea of boundaries and fence lines. Not like the old days when we were left to our own aimless wanderings. As I thought about all the creek names, my memory took the long road home.
***

In deep summer, we rode our horses bareback down the tree-lined length of Lagunitas Creek, swimming them through dark pools. One hot summer afternoon, I rode the entire length of the creek bed from Forest Knolls to Tocaloma on an elderly white Arabian gelding named Namún. It was well over 100° and he was at least 100 in horse years.

And though we were lazily plodding along, cool and deliciously wet beneath a canope of alders and redwoods, on the way home, my horse broke out in heat welts and began to wheeze and cough. I thought, omigod, he is going to die right there in the creekbed.

How was I going to explain to his owners why their favorite old horse died in the creek? I splashed Namún's body with water, but it didn't do any good. I had to leave the old man cooling off in a deep, sheltered pool near Jewell. I stroked his neck, he nuzzled me, as if seeking comfort, then despondently hung his head dangerously low into the water, and began to buckle his legs, as if to lay down.

I felt I had inadvertently broken some rule, but, other than distance, what was it? Arabs, renown for their stamina, can go on forever. Namún, don't lay down and drown on me! I pleaded. He seemed to understand. Straightened and locked his legs. Hung his head dangerously low to the water.

I scrambled up the silted embankment to the highway and ran through the hamlet of Jewel, screaming for help—and got someone to call to Namún's owner, horse trainer, Edie Lehman. Jewell had about three houses. Luckily someone was home.

Edie arrived in no time, pulling the big horse trailer with its green Rafter L Ranches logo. They lived down the road from me in the old Berini place on Arroyo Road. I was a stable hand and exerciser for her horses.

She showed me how to inject Namún with the antihistamines and when his breathing stabilized, we led him up the embankment and loaded him into the trailer. I never rode in the creekbed again.
***
Papermill Creek changes its name depending upon which part of the valley one lives in. In the San Geronimo Valley it's called Creamery Creek, the Dollar Creamery is long gone, but the place name survives as a Creamery Road.

In Lagunitas it assumes the moniker, Lagunitas. At Shafter's, the pools are all named. The creek becomes the Inkwell, and China House Bend. At Camp Taylor, where the rag papermill was founded, it becomes Papermill Creek, where it winds around the dark side of Mt. Barnabe, named after Sam Taylor's white mule.

Then there are the Gravel Pits, my family's favorite swimming hole. Right before the creek reaches Tomales Bay, it becomes White House Pool—where Teddy Roosevelt was fond of fishing for coho and silver salmon.

No wonder Bob Hass had a hard time with the direction of his rivers. We had a handful of conflicting names for the same creek.

I grew up on the other side of Mt. Barnabe, on a southern slope in full sunlight. Barnabe's mule bones have long since slipped back into the earth. We used to loiter by the pools of Lagunitas Creek, Carson Creek, Devil’s Gulch, and Arroyo Creek when the salmon were running, we waited for that flash, coinage of silver, vermilion and green heralded the fall.

Though the Devil's Gulch route was the most direct route over the mountain, and was one of my grandfather's favorite hikes, it was such a long, hot and desolate ride over the summit of Mt. Barnabe to Camp Taylor, we kids avoided it.

Following the flat railroad bed from Lagunitas, or the creekbed to Tocaloma was the easiest route.

There was also a more northerly route over Mt. Barnabe that avoided the summit. It took us along the hogback ridges through abandoned apple and bitter pear orchards down to the deserted settlement of Devil's Gulch. I felt so far from home, thankful for the warm reassurance of my horse under me.

It was in Devil's Gulch where my mother stumbled into a wasp's nest as a child and was nearly stung to death. My grandmother cooled the poor child off in the creek and covered her stings with fine clay mud to draw out the poison. My grandmother said it was always a longer walk home. But when something went wrong, the road home doubled in distance.

Sometimes I made a circle up over Mt. Barnabe and down its steep slopes to Camp Taylor and then return home up the railroad bed to Lagunitas and Arroyo Road. At one point or another, I've ridden most of what's left of the railroad beds from Woodacre to Tocaloma.

Early mornings, we'd race our horses along the flat stretches of railroad bed to the park gate. I always pulled out ahead at the quarter mile, but a two-mile course fatigued my quarter horse, and the nags would always pull ahead. Even Brenda Bullock's Icelandic pony, Helgar, or little Susie Mattsson's plug could beat my mare on the two-mile run.

Soon after that, my mare pulled up lame, but I was 15, and addicted to racing, I avoided the warning signals. Riding her bareback at breakneck speed was an unmatched thrill. She was pure verve and muscle, it was like riding a barrel down Class Two rapids.

One time when Becky Dart ran away with me at Kent Lake, I sawed on the bit until flecks of blood and foam decorated us, her tongue nearly cut in two by the metal snaffle bit. But still she ran, a Three Bars mare at heart.

It was spring, my sorrel mare was out to grass, but foxtails carpeted her wound. Every day I had to tweezer the stickers and oats out of the raw flesh, which I cauterized with silver nitrate. Daily I was reminded of what I'd done to this animal by racing her, she came from a long line of champion race horses, it was in her blood to run.

Granddaugher of the fabled Three Bars, my mare had the thoroughbred lineage of kings in her blood. She was one degree removed from The Preakness, the Kentucky Derby, Sarasota Springs. When my aunt's friend Chuck traced her pedigree, at first, he thought it was forged, but he said, If this proves to be true, you've got quite a valuable mare there, she could beget champions even if her knees were bad.

It was like finding a secret treasure in the woods, or a Vermeer hidden under an artless painting. There wasn't another horse in the valley who could match her at the quarter mile, and no one would race me unless it was a long track.

It was precisely on those kinds of afternoons when you knew spring had arrived. We'd ride and ride for miles on the open road. Time took us on a curious echoing quality. I can still recall the poignancy of late afternoon rides and the dappled roads under tall trees. Bleeding hearts, checker lilies and false Solomon's seal nodding their heads. Trilliums spreading their tripartite wings.

Riding horseback was as natural as walking or breathing. My best friend Stephanie Stone and I rode everywhere. We grew up and lost touch. I hadn't head from her in years. Her brother Eric said she had a horse in Arizona to ride and that helped to keep her sane through a loveless marriage. But that's when the drinking began. She kept it to herself. Held it in until the cancer ate her marrow.

At seventeen, after my mare tragically died of colic, from eating too much new spring grass in the Bianchi's pasture, I worked for the Lehman's training stable. I showed their horses at gymkhanas, I collected armloads of blue and red ribbons, but I didn't want to own another horse, losing her was devastating. She was big and beautiful, there was so more of her to love.

At nineteen, my other interests, my art—demanded that I move into the larger area of the world. I was at odds. Two worlds colliding. I had a chance to travel, a work-study job in Switzerland. I was sorry to leave, I almost didn't go to Europe, but Edie said, Don't be silly! It's a chance of a lifetime. Go! Have fun!

There were plenty of other girls, like Donna Lopez—who once unscrupulously kicked my horse right when I was in front of the judge, costing me the blue ribbon—girls like her were only too happy to step into my coveted job. And so she did.

I felt a crippling loss, separated from the horses like that. There was nothing much left of my childhood landscape. And so I sometimes dream of horses, and wake up with an inconsolable sense of longing. Everyone else moved into bucolic Marin. They came from LA, and from back east, they bought up the valley, they quickclaimed it and put up plywood palaces, they put up electric fences, they dammed the creeks and gated the roads.

They brought their urban nightmares with them. Runaway horses on the precipice.

When the invaders came, we lost more than our right of way. We lost our way.

The wild creature within me has slowly become urbanized with time. But I still dream of following the horses on endless fire roads running along the horizon.

Twenty years later, laid up with a bad knee, I am remembering it all as if it were yesterday. No point, no point of view. Merely Bob Hass's rivers running uphill against memory and time.

© rev. 2007; April 1, 1987, Maureen Hurley

Monster from the Deep, Bahamas

This morning I take coffee black, alone, in the main house. The residents are off to work and the guests are sleeping, or swimming at Orange Beach. Something moves in the bouganvilla. A cat?

Banana leaves clatter like a hard rain against the veranda. I keep thinking I'm in the middle of a mystery novel about a writer who uncovers a crime while researching the latest book. James Bond, and all that.

This place strips us bare. I can't tell the dreaming from the waking. The clock rattles at 7 a.m. The maid asks how I want my eggs. My watch reads 4 a.m., Pacific time. Maid?

Dave Evans, founder of the Napa Valley Poetry Conference, is the brainchild and midwife of this exotic adventure into poetry. The cast of poets is pretty extraordinary too. With the underwriting of a famous novelist's wife, we've managed to relocate the entire conference from the Napa wine country to the Bahamas. We are all poets in residence here.

I arrived in the archipelago of some 700 atolls and islands spread across 550 miles, a week early to help with the conference. But I spend most of my free time in the sea. I can't get enough of it. Dave is as red as a lobster. Kristine Lauretsen is a golden goddess. We drive to the tiny airport to welcome the poets.

Nearly all the poets come from California, and a few from New York, to attend this first international Bahamas writers' conference: a movable feast devours us.

But the sea is my siren call. Every dawn I hitch up my red pareau, precariously clinging to moist flesh, and head for the beach. My feet leave blue tracks in the pink sand. I take in humid mouthfuls of air. When I rise out of the ocean wearing my mask and snorkel, someone—Gary Sange—tells me I'm a monster rising from the deep.

Fish dream while awake. I dreamed my mother called out to me and a conch shell sounded nine times to call the fish back home to the burial ground. Carolyn Forché tells me to pull up my hidden memory. I take in a mouthful and choke on this confusion of sea and air.

Tongue of Ocean. Saline rivers 10,000 feet deep. Islands in the stream. I think of Hemmingway with his six-toed cats. But I'm not a fisherman. I take a quarter-mile swim. The shore is almost hidden by rolling swells. I am so far from home.

Lucayan Arawak Indians once lined conch shells along the eastern shore of these islands to remind the sun of its feathered cloak. We eat sweet, white meat of the conch. What's no longer needed is thrown back into the jungle. The barracuda sleeps and the shark is hungry.

Columbus named the island San Salvador, within 25 years all 50,000 of the Lycayans were dead. Words from the Lucayan: canoe, cannibal, hammock, hurricane and tobacco.

Shells and sea grass line the small turquoise dory. Gary Sange and I row out to the staghorn coral forests and talk of Crane's "Open Boat." We're near-twins both born in San Francisco, but he teaches in Virginia, and talks constantly about his wife, a ballet dancer. We watch iridescent turquoise triggerfish with flanged cobalt brows turn from lime-green to yellow. He talks about her so much, I almost know her name. Our anchor knocks off a piece of staghorn coral. It sounds like glass breaking. We're killing the reef with our carelessness.

Bob Hass tells us, "Try and avoid the verb, "to be" in your writing. He and Carolyn Forché take scuba tanks down with an unlicensed guide. Bob's respirator fails. Last week, at 30 feet, someone drowned. He is abruptly reminded that the word conspiracy is to breathe together.

When Bob's childhood sweetheart and wife learned the lump was benign, they wildly celebrate, the rejoice, but we notice the mantle of her being is separating from Bob's. I like her tall blonde ranginess. There is a lovely unpretentiousness about her. We are both natives of Marin. It is an unexpected bond this far from home.

Sharon Doubiago says, "One of the names for death is Blondie." Dave will meet Blondie soon enough when he returns home to Napa. Bob's wife has escaped death this time, but her marriage doesn't.

The pufferfish rolls his peacock-blue eyes at me, takes grave insult, and indignantly puffs up the size of a grapefruit when I yank his tail with my toes. No sign of the parrot fish's sleeping mantle.

Dead sea grass sticks to my body like confetti. I'm a Junkanoo festival in goombay time. I dive into sea grass to look for a shadow, the rippled edge of a shell. Gary is my unofficial dive partner, but I ditch him because the sea calls me like a secret lover to school me in the ways of Aprhodite.

Sharon argues with Gary Sange over the merits of formal education. The Bible and the L.A. Times were her writing teachers. She said, "I began writing prose to fill in the gaps in my personal history." Gary's a formalist. They come to an impasse of near blows. I hold my tongue. Sharon is my friend. Gary is my friend.

From above, the queen conch blends in with the white sandy bottom. The edible conch has spires that cast shadows, making it easier to spot. The waves also cast rippling shadows on the sea bed.

Midnight swim. Something followed me in the water. Nothing I could see—just a presence as if it were watching my back. The night holds more terror for me than the sea.

Marcella Taylor asks us to write about our recurring dreams and landscapes. And to address the goddess within ourselves. The goddess is undressing me until I am bone-naked.

At Nassau Harbor, mountains of conch shells line the shore—some are the size of a man's head. From shells of these large sea snails, artificial reefs line the shore like thousands of discarded pink dentures. We voraciously eat a spicy aphrodisiac of conch fritters, and marinated conch salad pickled with peppers and lime.

Aphrodite's arms. So many of us slipping off for secret assignations. My first night here, a Bahamian fed me fritters but I knew what was up. I spend my free time alone as my man, John Oliver Simon, is at home waiting for me.

A fisherman complains how the conch is getting scarcer on New Providence Island. He has to dive deeper and farther from shore on the outer islands. One of the most promising of the young Bahamian writers, Garth is from Catt Island. He tells us stories Andros Island is where the freshwater wells rise and fall with the tides.

Fresh water floats above the saline river. The water is brackish and my thirst deepens. With red hibiscus behind our ears, we dance to the steel drum and rasping saw. I prefer the left ear, and come to find that means I'm free. Owned by no man.

Scattered coins: hundreds of sand dollars in the sand bank. Casinos with no clocks. "Those of us who live here can't gamble, even us Americans," E.Lane Moore tells me.

From this harvest of the Deep, huge bleached urchins nestle like pale loaves of the fishermen. When the moon is on the water, the barracuda comes collecting.

As we bathe in the sea,
bone white lilies of our arms
blossom under the full moon.
Translucent fish slide between my thighs.
Distant thunder wraps itself in sheets
of ghost lightning.

This morning, the reef breaks through blue silk and is wreathed in whitecaps. A lace gown on the sea.

Storm at sea.

One begins to understand the yielding shape of a palm tree during a storm.

"When the hurricanes come, the wind howls like a banshee. Then it's calm. Don't go outside. That's the middle of the eye of the storm," one of the Bahamian poets tells us. "Then it begins again. We fill the bathtubs with water. Everybody drinks and parties until it goes away."

Beyond the reef, a boy diving behind the boat is attacked by sharks and doesn't survive. I am chastised for sneaking out and diving alone. Again.

A barge of brackish water from Florida arrives to ease the tourist drought in the Cable Beach condominiums. The tourists and the unslakable thirst of casuarina trees and cotton suck the land dry. This is a desert jungle.

"We're beginning to see beyond the postcard vision," said Carolyn.

A crimson beach fig leaf stains the stone cannon and cart in front of the decayed colonial mansion facing the sea. Discarded blood. They say Bluebeard slept here.

Bob tells us the story of Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea." Jane Eyre's story from the other perspective. "Calabanisms, he said. "How the colonial mentality separates you from yourself."

The Bahamas was a colony of Great Britain until 1973, and though 85% Black, the real power rested in the hands of a few Anglo Bay Street Boys. "But," Nathanial Mackey comments, "The structure doesn't change. Only the color of the skin does."

Marcella Taylor says, "I have non-exclusive feelings of race and nationality. I have problems with national boundaries."

In "The Gulf," Jamaican poet Derek Walcott writes,"The process by which the poet writes is the vehicle to establish a national identity."

One Bahamian writer tells us," I don't know who I am. I'm not West Indies. I don't fit in with the Blacks, and in England I'm looked upon as a colonist. What am I supposed to be?"

The question of identity in the Bahamas is also a question of race. Many Bahamians refer to a constructed history which doesn't predate the end of slavery.

Nate Mackey observes, "This alienation is not theoretical."

Another Bahamian writer complains,"I have no stories to write about. My life is not interesting, not like yours." She recounts how her great-grandfather was thrown overboard in a wooden box and he landed on an uninhabited outer island. We sit, transfixed.

Carolyn and Bob tell them, "We came here to learn from you. We don't know your literature. You tell us."

We are not neo-colonialists come to re-enforce 300 years of dominant culture. We want to learn about the emerging genre of Bahamian writing by becoming students with them.

Until 1974, the Bahamas did not have educational institutions beyond high school which most of the Black population did not attend. The only place to get published is at College of the Bahamas, with its preoccupation for proper 19th c. British forms. It's all about mimicking Keats and Shelley.

There are two dialects: Queen's English and nation-speak, which is closer to our New Orleans dialect. Or Creole. Bahamians are careful to speak only Queen's English to us.

Someone asks, "Did you go over the hill yet?" A rite of passage. Blue Hill. Fox Hill. Hills here are relative. Yes, there are picturesque buckled houses with layers of blistered paint in brilliant hues. No windows or water.

A red leaf among the green like a snake in the garden. Fodder for our poetic appetites.

The land snails I collect in the jungle crawl away during the night. I follow glistening trails.

Bob Hass asks us, "What is opposite in your childhood that you poetically crave?"

Like cumbersome crabs, we swimmers crawl out of the ocean. A Black man walking along the shore sings out, "Hey coconut! Buy some." A woman selling shell necklaces croons, "Be good to me, Honey!" Gary indulges her.

Flame trees and tequila sunsets grate against an opalescent sea. The image of the full golden moon against silhouetted palms trees still won't leave me.

Sharon tells us, "Coming to another country, your consciousness changes."

All right, I'll admit I came here because I thought it sounded exotic. By day, ragged children sell shells by the docks and by night they steal water from the hotels.

He g'wan roun,
catch de drops o' wahter in da night.
Over da hill, he g'wan
roun.

The insidiousness of poverty settles into the psyche like a fine dust. Jungle flowers carry the pervasive odor of decay. Transplanted European ruins and casinos inhabit Paradise Island. We read poetry in a 14th century cloister transported from France.

I wait for the statue of Persephone to emerge into sunlight with one hand shadowing her face, and walk down these long corridors roofed by clouds to listen to the man reading poetry in her garden.

She stood in rapt attention for so long,
her marble features have softened.
Hoarded iron from slave ships
stained these white columns
and rust shavings blossomed in the sea.

"Down at da bridge. Get some snow, here. Only a dollah!"

I go over the hill and begin to see past the postcard. Sweet frangipani, almost foetid. Foliage entwines with rusted cans, bottles and conch shells glowing pink—a salmon sunset nestled in the leathery green leaves.

Rotting conch flesh claws my nostrils leading me deeper into the jungle. A feeling of trespass overcomes me as if we were peering up the skirts of our dead grandmothers—expecting to find a lover.

Marcella asks us to write what kind of animal we are.

At the governor's palace we're invited to tea and we stuff ourselves on delicate sandwiches as scantily clad models stalk down the ramp. Lady Cash officially welcomes us to the Bahamas.

This hand uncovers ghosts from the past. I photograph a jacket slung over a marble rail, sleeves luffing in the wind, like a boat without oars.

The van lurches down dirt roads, past shacks on stilts where kerosene lanterns illumine old men sitting in doorstoops. Barefoot kids run in front of us, shrieking with laughter. Only their teeth and the whites of their eyes shine in this darkness.

A small boy carries water in plastic gallon jugs. A slumbering pig on a tether grunts and returns to dreaming. A revival church with brilliant electric light jars me into the 20th century.

The sea breathes outside my window. The ceiling fan whispers to itself something I can't understand. A stranded cockroach buzzes in circles on his back. Mindful of them, we learn to shuffle our feet in the darkness.

A maid straightens up the day's clutter. I'm growing used to the maid. It's becoming easier to make invisible slaves, but our poetry is becoming rawboned.

What can one say that hasn't been said before about the tropics that hasn't been depicted on every postcard from here to Tahiti? Nathanial says it's possible to enter the consciousness of another.

Hot noon on an outer island.
The hermit crab,
afraid to leave his shell, died.

A small lesson of survival is illustrated for us. We have 128 circadian rhythms that control us during the course of a day making it difficult to adjust time.

Liquid silver eyes of translucent surf minnows—miniature eclipses swimming between my fingers. At home it will be hours before dawn breaks. At home, I will remember what Sharon said about us being aliens here. But I will also be an alien at home too.

When the sea grass dies,
it is whiter than this beach.

From here, my tracks look like those of a sea turtle. I ate the forbidden meat of the conch and dreamed of a thin man who came in darkness to kill me. My monsters become more tangible in this place. I waken to the thin reed sound of my own screaming.

Caught in a rip tide, I swim toward my dive partner, Gary, but I am trapped in a wall of water and I swim until I am exhausted. I hold his life in my hands. I am responsible for him. He swims farther out in the sea garden, oblivious of the danger. I have no choice but to follow him. Terror reigns. I break through the rip tide and it eventually carries us both safely to shore. I do not tell him of the danger we faced. He is new to the sea, swimming with confidence. My almost twin.

Marcella tells us the unconscious and poetry are alike. "Fiction focuses on a period of time. Try for a border between the conscious and unconscious."

She sends us out into the jungle alone. It begins to rain. I write, "There are trees here that have no names." But then, because they have no names, I can't continue. Nouns define and separate species.

Bob says,"What I like about poetry is that it's like lightning. The heart starts rushing toward some answers. Try and contradict yourself early on in the poem." But it's really about verbs after all.

A small nurse shark swims beneath my thighs. Cat eyes curious, she follows us in a slow game of tag a half a mile from shore. I hold out the queen conch in offering. Sensing danger, its mantle begins to coil around the lip of the shell, and my fingers like a large tongue.

The shark ignores the offering knowing it's inedible. Attracted by the minute traces of blood from my period, the shark follows us expectantly, waiting. Its ventral slits rhythmically opening and closing with the rise and falling of water.

Barbels, whiskers brush us as it circles. Through our snorkels we nervously laugh and look for the mother lurking on the edge of this murky celadon bowl.

As Gary and I head in, the shore slips beneath the distant thin green punctuation between sea and sky. We can only return to the sea as visitors.

An air bubble suspends a green bottle above the sand so that the neck scribbles unintelligible marks on the rippled bottom. We dive down and free the bottle from its tedious task. A guitarfish sweeps his mantle over hundreds of bottles filled with saline brew.

In the scrub brush along the cliffs, I find a bag of women's clothing. I look for bodies in the undergrowth.

My soul sleeps in the tropics
and I am separated from myself
for long periods of time.
Clouds cover the moon like a map of Africa.
Beneath the odor of frangipani,
blue-tailed lizards mate,
thrust out ochre bibs of ruffed lace.

Carolyn reminds us to keep our appointments with the muse, to pull up our hidden memory, and clarify our private emotions. Follow our inner rhythms.

Nathanial says, "Remember this small family of words, this endangered species. Think about your own boundaries as writers."

Bob adds, "Art is dialectical; it speaks in opposites. One way to tell the truth is to break all the rules."

Weightless, we drift in aquamarine and come up for air like seals. Sharon crests a mountainous wave as I slide into a trough. We dive for shells and collect fragments of poetry.

The wind catches her words and flings them over her shoulder like sea spray. I watch her lips move. I taste salt at the corners of my mouth. I taste the bitterness of this place. Bleached limestone cliffs push against a skin of jungle like bones jutting from the carcass of a dead animal.

The old sea bottom of coral and shell blinds me, reflecting the light back into my eyes.

Recipe: Begin each morning by returning to the cradle. Tread water. Feel salt sting on the lips. Breathe in humid air where the slow speech of words foams over the reef.

Begin.

Summer of 1985


© 1985 Maureen Hurley, at Orange Hill, Nassau Island, Bahamas. Portions of this essay have appeared in Caribbean Writer and the Nassau Guardian. Glenna Luschei was supposed to make an anthology of our Bahama writing, and asked me to revise this, then never made the book. Story of my life. I remember being stuck on it, under deadline, and John Oliver Simon helped me revise it, banging away on his upright typewriter, circa September, 1985, when it reached its present form, but I'm posting it here for proximity purposes.

rev. 2007, and 2014

Port Townsend

This town, once the biggest port outside of New York in the 1890s, is where the Chinese had carved tunnels under the streets, some tunnels are still standing. Dock Street is gone now, Water Street is the main drag.

They had to call it uptown because the uppity ladies wouldn't shop here. Water Street, where the red light is now, is for the ferry traffic.

Across from the Town Tavern, is a building the old guy inherited on the condition that he improve it, but he was caught tunneling under Water Street. Some say he was headed for the bank. No one really knows for sure. The city fathers were upset when one day Water Street caved in right in front of his building.

The year before last, he had boarded up all the windows, and before that, all the metal Victorian cornices were taken off. This year, he's unboarding a few of the windows and is painting the sashes blue. Like the sky.

This town, once a whore's town, is now a literary town. All the poets are well read. It's still a whore's town. There are red lights shining on the streets at night and, after dark, the literary whores flood the streets like migrant workers in a tent city.

Tourists and Winnebagos with California license plates cautiously drive through town to the ferry dock. They come into the Town Tavern looking for something harder than the soft liquor license allows. And we stare at their improbable attire, women wearings nylons with shorts, and men in perma-press suits. All the old hippies here are working as bartenders, and caretakers. it's all a juggling act.

I keep coming back to this town like a bad penny. A friend of mine, Sharon Doubiago, moved here to escape a broken heart. Little do I know, that this year, my heart will be in the same repair shop. Hearts are not made of porcelain, but of grist and sinew and blood.

There's that poignant moment of initiation. We all recognize the place where broken hearts either mend, or evolve into some other plane.

Whore hearts, we're all whores with hearts of gold, the wrong color for blood. Gold, the correct color for lizard blood. As we sniff out the color-coded hearts of those around us, our lizard eyes narrow, we taste the air with our forked tongues, and we retreat into reptilian silence.

Tourists pour into the Town Tavern. You can tell what time of day it is by the number of disembarked people at the bar. Like the ebb and flow of waves, the oak and glass double-doors swing to and fro, as the tourist surging in from the ferry, feel the need to slake their great thirst.

The man I am having an affair with is having trouble finding the bedroom where he last left his heart. He thinks his capacity for love is greatly influenced by his capacity for pain. I'm a transient blow-in. There's the bond that ties us all together, here in this town of whores. Down at the bar, we paint it red.

August, 1981

Port Alberni

Port Alberni, Vancouver Island – I overdrove my mark, a hitchhiker said she knew where I wanted to go, and we missed our turnoff, so I'm staying with her in a strange house. I know not where.

The moon is a rusted silver crescent hanging below Venus. Mountains fringe this place like shards of glass. Montgomery School Principal, Ken Lytle used to live here years ago, when he was a boy. The hills around Cazadero's Montgomery School are much like this place.

It is 50 miles away to Uclulet by water, it means safe harbor. Or, just water. A Nootka word. You ride the mail boat to get there – it's an eight hour trip. The road to Tofino is even longer. Uclulet looks like Point Reyes. I watch the same ocean here, as I would at home.

Ken Lytle spent some time in Port Alberni as a kid and hated it. I can see why. Port Alberni, Dante's Inferno of the Northwest is surrounded by snowcapped mountains. It has a gorgeous fjord that meanders 50 miles to the Pacific, it's a mile wide and a mile deep, but the brown oily water from the pulp mill, like flotsam. Paper pulp loosing from ships floats out to sea. The fish leaping to the surface gasping for air, ground from the pulpmill when it rains, it is an acid rain. Hell on earth.

I'm staying with friends in a rustic log cabin in Parksville. Pete Lang's wife Sarah is teaching me to belly dance. Downstep, thrust, downstep, thrust. Work down into the floor, not up into the sky. The outhouse has a blue plastic sky. I stepped on a slug, barefoot. I’m stuck to the earth now.

A friend of mine, Ken Lytle once threw a slug at his wife when they lived in Cazadero. And when I washed my jeans, there a slug was in the washing machine. There isn't any way to get slug glue off. Damned, those jeans are Calvin Kleins. I traded a pair of cowboy boots for them. The slug crawled through Ken’s wife’s hair. He said she washed her hair seven times. It never came out. But she washed that man right out of her hair. They are now divorced.

Sharon Doubiago said to write a story about your clothes. I think of Frida Kahlo. Sharon says that she still has the same clothes. From year-to-year, the stories about clothes stack up and accumulate like clothes in the closet. 

Once when we went out dancing in the town of Elk on the coast of Mendocino, the leotard I had scrounged from a trashcan, ripped down the back. I borrowed her special heart pin and then I lost it. It was found later on the dance floor, broken. We glued it back together – our friendship mended. Sort of.

Sharon will run away to Port Townsend to escape a broken heart. Did I trigger it when I lost her heart pin?