Saturday, April 4, 1992
Journal entry, 4/4/92, Venice boardwalk
4/4/92, Celia and I walk along the Venice boardwalk after dark talking of violence, how danger arrives in the lives of innocent bystanders in the form of stray bullets, come along home little eagles. A memory from the past, I was 10, walking along that same dark alley with a friend wanting money. For two bits I was molested by an old man in a seedy abandoned hotel room but I’d forgotten all this. Only now as I walk along the stained ribbon, that last wall that divides the strand from terra firma, it all comes back as Celia warned me of stray bullets.
I realize a random act can be no less violent than my own childhood, here along these canals where I ran with the pack. I thought I had no LA poems in me, but the city of Angels and the canals have witnessed a multitude of sins, passages. Mine is one more sexual stroke swelling the purgatory of sinners, the collective unconscious. I didn’t feel betrayed by the man, but by the girl who led me there. I refused to play with her again. I chose to be lonely and alone rather than face that betrayal again.
I write this missive in transito. On the plane. In first class, a man yells, and yells again. I am so scared. The word oxygen is bantered about. We are a temporary audience in bad Hollywood fashion. One summer I lived on a hill across from those big white letters. I guess everyone’s got to write their LA poem, al la Bukowski just like everyone’s got their own baby Bukowski story to tell as well.
But I should, yes, two angels, with smooth pubescence, no betrayal of sex, they are asexual angels who will never know the thrill of a mouth on nipple, clitoris rising in the most holy moments. Do they dream?
And when we bring in the wash, in the sheets, we uncover the pale beginnings of the origins of love. How impeccable white takes on the dolor of the sky As a child I never understood why the sky beneath the eucalyptus took on the greyness of lead.
The plane pulls back from the loading dock. A man leaves, a cop enters, another man leaves and everyone is growing an extra vertebrae in their necks, trying to piece together the story, any one will do, as long as it’s plausible. I guess that’s the way it was with us. Happiness was plausible, therefore we were plausible. After all, you were a Rhodes Scholar, John. You should know, Greek letters trailing you like ropes from Baja to the Andes.
No I don’t regret those poems lying next to me in a book, years later, it’s just the shock of it. And yes we were happy, if just for an instant on that beach in the port of Angels so much further south of the border. Who was to know that when we murdered our unborn son, we were accomplices to the murder of love.
Yes. Those jaded eyes will come back to haunt us through stinging arrows—words pierce the transparent air and find their target, years after conception, while we kiss the lips of strangers, and begin anew for the umpteenth time, but isn’t this the American way?
And so in the city of Angels, I visited you again and again, my lover, entonces, always to the shores of Mexico, where you would shed your gringo skin, but never your eyes – all that green and blue settling in the cenote as you sleep in El Convento where DH Lawrence signed the register, where he resurrected the Plumed Serpent into English palabras.
At the Sculpture Gardens, the other writers and I exchanged pleasantries in Español. I read my poems for the waiters at the garden, not for the well powdered, more than middle-aged audience. I see the ones standing by the door listening so intently. I’m sure the words have wings fluttering, las almas, into the soul of the afternoon where sunlight takes its own choosing, the hour of reckoning.
Last night we set the clocks ahead in order to trick ourselves into thinking there was an extra hour in the day, but like with everything in the city, as with these word, it’s an illusion. White against white equals white. My skin is an intermediate step between the tongue of racial tolerance. No longer am I the white whore because I speak in tongues. The bus boy says, I wish to write poetry. I encourage him in both languages. The language of grief cannot hide the truth and why I am alone, Poetry, my inheritor, mi amor.
LATE NIGHT FLIGHT FROM LA
LATE NIGHT FLIGHT FROM LA
Oh, it has come to this,
your poems read after reading,
on a late night flight from LA,
where on the canals, you and I last read,
how many years ago now?
Six years and I am reading your poems
as if written by a stranger to another stranger,
where the word, or is it verb, lover
rested easily on your lips, was it the—
My clothes spinning in the dryer,
the happiness you spoke of,
she loves me, she loves me not,
and now when I read them I wonder,
to woman were these small piercing arrows
aimed at? But I am transparent,
the invisible woman fills this courtyard
with her own words, arrows fortuning across the plaza
And there is nothing left to wound,
except the memory of pain,
intransient as the gnats circling each person
a live halo buzzing each of us.
Returning home to this spawning ground,
I am fully fledged, not like the last time.
4/4/92?
Oh, it has come to this,
your poems read after reading,
on a late night flight from LA,
where on the canals, you and I last read,
how many years ago now?
Six years and I am reading your poems
as if written by a stranger to another stranger,
where the word, or is it verb, lover
rested easily on your lips, was it the—
My clothes spinning in the dryer,
the happiness you spoke of,
she loves me, she loves me not,
and now when I read them I wonder,
to woman were these small piercing arrows
aimed at? But I am transparent,
the invisible woman fills this courtyard
with her own words, arrows fortuning across the plaza
And there is nothing left to wound,
except the memory of pain,
intransient as the gnats circling each person
a live halo buzzing each of us.
Returning home to this spawning ground,
I am fully fledged, not like the last time.
4/4/92?
Sunday, March 15, 1992
FOR THE ANCIENT MARINER (Beyer ditty)
An occasional poem for George Beyer from the Rebstocks
No coyness is needed to introduce the slayer of dragons
The swashbuckler is restless, and philosophical flagons
Spill the time-tested aspiring Bayer wisdom of the ages
Desire: mere pearls before rime are courageous adages,
Say the sages. Old flames. Love knows no limits, no bounds,
Nothing less profound than your heart resounds.
For it takes lengthy experienceómore than that of accolades
To measure, so brilliantly, the full breadth of your decades,
As you celebrate with passion, your 80-odd years
(If I may take the liberty to explain); it appears
That nothing, except breath, comes as easily as praise
Issuing forth (in arrears) for our man Beyer. We are all ablaze
Speaking in heroic couplets, and blossoming forth from our lips
Loose quips capable of sinking even the most stalwart of ships.
Harken to the stern! Damsels in need of rescuing ahoy!
No need to dwell on those lost opportunities of the past.
For you, a life-time supply of rubbers to curl your toes fast,
To make your knees weak; this is no blanket condom-nation.
(Now, try and explain yourself out of this ticklish situation.)
And so to the ends of the earth, we send you French Letters
With postage due (in the hopes that you may still find something better
To do with your time than to listen to those silly old nursery rhymes.)
Rise to waken and take your rising slow (in dubious paradigms)
For the gentle cock that percheth in thy lady's chamber is naught
About tough old roosters or gamey hens ready for the stew-pot.
These jib lines are for sale, no insurance pitches to gum up the works.
A package of life-preservers (what the doctor ordered) lurks
Waiting to set the infinity of 8 on its side, and zero on its head!
The big eight-oh oh oh . . .take these safes to thy daily bed. . .
(Oops! I think I've said more than I ought to,
A good thing this is Novato, not Kalamazoo.)
Time's a wasting, me matey, to celebrate the beauty of her.
Keep a stiff. . .er, upper lip, don't be a heart-breaker.
Stalwart ship, raise thy mizzenmast, let the wind play
Out your sails, for at the ends of the earth
there be dragons to s(lay).
4/17/92
1st draft 3/15/92
(This was a commissioned poem for a birthday roast...)
1st draft 3/15/92
(This was a commissioned poem for a birthday roast...)
Monday, March 9, 1992
Journal entry, 3/6/92, art opening, Women Depicting Women
Anyway, I come home very depressed. I am missing Valera, and I am listening to the Leningrad Rok Opera, Juno and Avos, I’m thinking in Russian and in Spanish, bypassing English completely, wondering what language to think in, mixing them all up.
I rented two movies, Christy Brown’s My Left Foot, and Nicholas and Alexandra. I drink a glass of red wine for my cramps, I’m in the bleeder’s hut. I remember my grandmother telling me about Christy Brown, showing me his paintings all done with his left foot. Irish and Russian. It always comes back to that. Mining the past. Does it really take five Hail Marys to set the souls free? King of the bonfire. Wickerman still burns. Christy’s first word, Mother, and I am crying for I don’t know what. My grandmother had me picking up marbles with my toes to strengthen them, she said. I learned dexterity with my toes drawing, painting, picking up buttons, preparing for the future.
Thursday, March 5, 1992
Dreaming in yellow
Did you know that the molecules of darkness are transparent? Reach into your pocket and grab some so that we can begin the story. In the beginning it was dark, darker the night. The ancestors of color were undifferentiated, they hadn’t yet migrated. The ancestor of yellow swam towards the beginning of time. Yellow lives in the hearts of mustard flowers, and in the feathers of songbirds. Canaries know yellow best. Sent down into the darkness of mines to warn the miners of poisonous gasses, yellow is the color of warning. Yellow is the buttercup held under the chin of a child in spring, yellow is butter’s secret. It is the first floral reminder of spring. It is the sun’s reminder to the earth in winter not to forget about the spring. Everyone knows those who will be born in those who will die will know at least two names of darkness. The pavement under new houses becomes a name for darkness. Under the pen, the space between the paper and the ink is a place where darkness hides. Green is the secret desire of yellow. Grass seeds buried under the earth dream in yellow.
3/5/92
LATE AT NIGHT I GET CALLS
LATE AT NIGHT I GET CALLS
—for Igor Tischler
Late at night I get calls from strangers
who speak good English with thick Russian accents
from places like North Carolina, New York, Iowa—
They are homesick, or want to send packages of shoes
to daughters left behind in Moscow, Leningrad, Cherkassy.
In this way, I find out about my friends in Russia—
via the Slavic grapevine. It's always the same news:
times are hard, life is a struggle, the price of bread in every conversation.
Igor says: I get homesick for America when he is already living here.
He has grown used to conveniences, the quality of food, the sameness.
He says: in every store the bananas are in the same corner.
Here, I don't have to worry about where to find them.
Natasha says her family is fine, they eat lots of bread now—
when they can get it. The lines are longer than ever.
I think of all the dried bread in every Russian apartment,
so glad I didn't throw out Valera's stored bread
when I cleaned the cabinets—meal bugs, stale food.
Guilty of what little food I did toss—bugs are protein too.
Cereal laced with insects and mouse shit sticks in my craw.
In America, I'm not reduced to such choices.
The green canned meat he wouldn't let me throw out,
or the furry sausage saying, it's good. Vicusna. Hotchish?
In America we throw out food that's still good.
In Russia, any food is considered spoils;
a people constantly at war with bureaucracy.
Booty in the form of dried bread, a bank account.
Daily bread to feed the birds. There is no equation to be made.
In Russia, all of life is punctuated with lines.
Late at night I talk to friends of friends who I've never met,
we share something in common.
Always they say: Khome veesit our khaus in Ameerika!
And I know they mean it—
their doors to their hearts always unlocked
for the potential future friend.
Because in this way, they will survive.
Friends are everything. Isolation is death.
Better off in Siberia, or Magadan with friends.
Here, we are voluntary exiles, xenophobes used to the soft life,
we slam doors on our own thumbs as a matter of course.
The more Igor and I discuss American and Russian psyches,
the more we discover we are alike,
having traded places somewhere during the first thaw
of the Cold War. The final thaw, irrevocably.
Censorship comes to mind. Michael Jackson's crotch.
Igor laments Edward Albee, the American Chekhov
is unknown in his own country.
Those who recognize his name ask: is he still alive?
Albee met Igor with a bouquet of flowers at JFK airport at 6 am,
easing his transition into the den of iniquity. Albee? I'm stunned.
Flowers for the death of one way of life and the birth of another.
But what of all the daughters of Russia waiting for American shoes?
Igor says: I do fine here, but sometimes, late at night,
I go crazy with fear. What he can't do is send shoes to his daughter.
Like Vadim who keeps buying more shoes on sale,
because the others have become too small.
Neither can send shoes home: the package is small,
do you know of anyone going to Russia?
I say: Yes. I will ask, so they can ease back to sleep,
knowing the storyline by heart, how hell is named,
with shoes, becomes tangible. It is empowerment.
Here, they have money to buy shoes, no way to send them.
The choices are: to stay in Russia together as a family
and have nothing, or to escape to America's golden streets
and send things to the family left at home.
Most never want to go back. The well-muscled
American night is filled with longing for homeland,
all those orphan shoes walking in the night
towards all the daughters of home.
3/5/92
—for Igor Tischler
Late at night I get calls from strangers
who speak good English with thick Russian accents
from places like North Carolina, New York, Iowa—
They are homesick, or want to send packages of shoes
to daughters left behind in Moscow, Leningrad, Cherkassy.
In this way, I find out about my friends in Russia—
via the Slavic grapevine. It's always the same news:
times are hard, life is a struggle, the price of bread in every conversation.
Igor says: I get homesick for America when he is already living here.
He has grown used to conveniences, the quality of food, the sameness.
He says: in every store the bananas are in the same corner.
Here, I don't have to worry about where to find them.
Natasha says her family is fine, they eat lots of bread now—
when they can get it. The lines are longer than ever.
I think of all the dried bread in every Russian apartment,
so glad I didn't throw out Valera's stored bread
when I cleaned the cabinets—meal bugs, stale food.
Guilty of what little food I did toss—bugs are protein too.
Cereal laced with insects and mouse shit sticks in my craw.
In America, I'm not reduced to such choices.
The green canned meat he wouldn't let me throw out,
or the furry sausage saying, it's good. Vicusna. Hotchish?
In America we throw out food that's still good.
In Russia, any food is considered spoils;
a people constantly at war with bureaucracy.
Booty in the form of dried bread, a bank account.
Daily bread to feed the birds. There is no equation to be made.
In Russia, all of life is punctuated with lines.
Late at night I talk to friends of friends who I've never met,
we share something in common.
Always they say: Khome veesit our khaus in Ameerika!
And I know they mean it—
their doors to their hearts always unlocked
for the potential future friend.
Because in this way, they will survive.
Friends are everything. Isolation is death.
Better off in Siberia, or Magadan with friends.
Here, we are voluntary exiles, xenophobes used to the soft life,
we slam doors on our own thumbs as a matter of course.
The more Igor and I discuss American and Russian psyches,
the more we discover we are alike,
having traded places somewhere during the first thaw
of the Cold War. The final thaw, irrevocably.
Censorship comes to mind. Michael Jackson's crotch.
Igor laments Edward Albee, the American Chekhov
is unknown in his own country.
Those who recognize his name ask: is he still alive?
Albee met Igor with a bouquet of flowers at JFK airport at 6 am,
easing his transition into the den of iniquity. Albee? I'm stunned.
Flowers for the death of one way of life and the birth of another.
But what of all the daughters of Russia waiting for American shoes?
Igor says: I do fine here, but sometimes, late at night,
I go crazy with fear. What he can't do is send shoes to his daughter.
Like Vadim who keeps buying more shoes on sale,
because the others have become too small.
Neither can send shoes home: the package is small,
do you know of anyone going to Russia?
I say: Yes. I will ask, so they can ease back to sleep,
knowing the storyline by heart, how hell is named,
with shoes, becomes tangible. It is empowerment.
Here, they have money to buy shoes, no way to send them.
The choices are: to stay in Russia together as a family
and have nothing, or to escape to America's golden streets
and send things to the family left at home.
Most never want to go back. The well-muscled
American night is filled with longing for homeland,
all those orphan shoes walking in the night
towards all the daughters of home.
3/5/92
COLLAGE POEM
COLLAGE POEM
Blossoms under a full moon,
stone hard; thunder comes crawling
across the sound barrier of clouds
as if its companion light
were trapped in deep summer,
dreams remembering the past
as blue as the thoughts of fish
waiting to be water, becoming water,
telling me of separation and of darkness.
The ocean tides pull at my heart,
shimmering storm waiting to be air,
becoming the air.
3/5/1992
Blossoms under a full moon,
stone hard; thunder comes crawling
across the sound barrier of clouds
as if its companion light
were trapped in deep summer,
dreams remembering the past
as blue as the thoughts of fish
waiting to be water, becoming water,
telling me of separation and of darkness.
The ocean tides pull at my heart,
shimmering storm waiting to be air,
becoming the air.
3/5/1992
Monday, March 2, 1992
Journal entry, 3/2/92 Poetry Reading, Center of the Universe, Sonoma
3/2/92 God, it’s only 8 AM and I’m sleepy. I’ve got an interview at 1 PM and I need to schedule teaching at Monte Rio school at 3:30, then I have a reading in Sonoma at 7:30 PM and I don’t feel well. Horrible headache yesterday didn’t help. I’m a little chilled, like I’m coming down with something.
I read at the Center of the Universe café, there were a few more people this time, but this time I was off, I couldn’t quite match the words with the tongue, but Jim Bird said, The emotion in the intellect were there. I felt like I could’ve read a telephone book, or random words, the emotions carry the poems, people like my words, even strangers. The strange young man who inhabits the camps of the Grateful Dead, listens intently. I read for a half an hour, but I’m annoyed with a sudden open mic. foisted right in the middle of my set instead of at the end, as planned.
One young man wanted to read five minutes, then someone else had to read another five minutes, because the first one did, and so on, etc. So much for the two minute rule. Or Andy Warhols 15 seconds of fame. The poetry is pure crap. We all have to begin somewhere. The audience disappears. Open mic readers have had their five minutes of fame, the rest of the audience is bored to tears, so they all leave. I was terribly annoyed by the interruption, since it takes me so long to reach my stride.
Anyway Allegra Broughton, SSU Expressive Arts classmate, played music before I read my second set, which was lovely. At least this time the audience didn’t disappear. Her uncle is James Broughton, the Northbeach poet
Jim and Nancy went out for a drink at the Sonoma Hotel afterwards. I get fed dinner and I was paid $10 for the reading. Jim brought me a glass of Chardonnay afterwards. I could have used an entire bottle. I read entirely from my Invisible Boundaries manuscript, so strange and different from my old work, the rhythms are not the same anymore. Paul Mariah gave me an ammo box for my truck, something for the long ride home?
Sunday, March 1, 1992
RINGSIDE SEATS TO A BURNING
RINGSIDE SEATS TO A BURNING
I take photos of a house burning exercise,
Bob Rozette, Graton fire department medic
automatically slips into the vernacular,
as if to lessen the burden of reality.
Yeah I got cooked, we had a real barbecue earlier.
Though the fire is real, the exercise
is a test, a training ground.
One man, # 20, examines his melted helmet.
Bob explains how his clothes,
three layers of jeans material
are woven with a special cloth, keep out the heat.
If someone sweats, it will turn into steam,
thus burning him, he explains.
The house is engulfed in flames,
the water pipes in the shower
emerge from the carnage.
Young girls with babies,
and their firemen husbands
picnicking on the grass, watch,
ringside seats to a burning.
The final wall falls,
then the wooden foundation,
the steps are the last to go.
3/1/92
Forestville
I take photos of a house burning exercise,
Bob Rozette, Graton fire department medic
automatically slips into the vernacular,
as if to lessen the burden of reality.
Yeah I got cooked, we had a real barbecue earlier.
Though the fire is real, the exercise
is a test, a training ground.
One man, # 20, examines his melted helmet.
Bob explains how his clothes,
three layers of jeans material
are woven with a special cloth, keep out the heat.
If someone sweats, it will turn into steam,
thus burning him, he explains.
The house is engulfed in flames,
the water pipes in the shower
emerge from the carnage.
Young girls with babies,
and their firemen husbands
picnicking on the grass, watch,
ringside seats to a burning.
The final wall falls,
then the wooden foundation,
the steps are the last to go.
3/1/92
Forestville
Saturday, February 29, 1992
Journal entry, 2/29/92, Leap Day deadlines
I had to re-organize my manuscript, some techniques that Lee Perron showed me the other night, over dinner, dropping the buts the ands, and the whiles from my poems—all those articles and particles conveyed uncertainty. It also meant I had to reread every poem and make changes and reprint them all but my printer wasn’t working right and neither was Adobe Type Manager. The start-up icon went missing and it took me a while to figure it out.
This last step was crucial, because he said to reprint my manuscript using a good type face. Geneva 12 point is too big, and 10 point is too small, 11 point doesn’t quite do it either, and since I have a true type printer, my font choices are limited, even with ATM running. I put 64 pages of poetry into Goudy typeface and it took me the entire day to run them off. I couldn’t use the Mac while it was printing. I was supposed to have my Ann Woodhead story done yesterday as well and I’ve only typed a few lines, it’s overdue. I need two Macs.
I just found out that two of my photos, The Lament for the Women of Russia, and Volcano Goddess Erotica/Madame Pele, that I sent in to the Sonoma County Arts Council at the end of December, 1991, were accepted for the Women Depicting Women art exhibit. Late, I was, second to last to drop off my pieces, but Diane Shulkin was still at the Arts Council. She said my writing has become famous. I was puzzled, then she showed me Mary Silverwood’s bio and I am quoted in it—a big paragraph at the top. So, as Mary’s career takes off, Canada, Britain, etc., my words travel with her. They become her official mascot.
Simone Wilson invited me over for a hot tub, and a disk swap. Lo and behold, she had the impossible to find ATM version, as the normal Palatino font won’t work with my printer. So now I have two typefaces I can use, at the 11th hour. But I think I like Goudy typeface better, it’s more elegant. There are literally hundreds of fonts available for the Mac, I have disks full of fonts, but there are less than a handful that are acceptable as a poetry typeface.
I also sent out 10 batches of poems and wrote a 2000-word article on Ann Woodhead. I usually don’t turn in my articles on the same day I write them, it’s too new and too raw, and I can’t see where it needs work, but I was already a day late, and had to turn it in. It takes me about three hours to pull it together, to add only 300 more words. Talk about leaping into the day, a day in the life of…
Thursday, February 27, 1992
SPRING WRITES REIBLI ROAD
SPRING
WRITES REIBLI ROAD
Today,
on the way to school, I was struck by the sculptural quality of the oaks, of vines,
and hills. Perhaps the clarity and angle of light makes things seem more real. Or
is it because the wild cherry-plums have suddenly declared their hiding places,
small white plumes along the undergrowth and along the riverfields. Signs of escaped,
or abandoned civilizations, the progeny of Europe and Asia Minor blooms in
Californian fields. Opportunistic mustard burns the retina—acid-yellow flecked
with green. Small riots of narcissi and daffodils declare miniature kingdoms. Freesias,
drops of pioneer blood scattered in the fields, inheritors of the abandoned homesteads.
Soon, the native lupines will dress the hills with indigo robes, columbine and larkspur
embroidered in the folds, and the poppies will blazon each shoulder. The distant
snore of a bulldozer punctuates the dominion of someone’s dreams.
The
lazy slant of books eases towards the horizon. Goldfish, small birds in the
dark water rush up a ladder to the sky. The heart of a blue whale weighs more
than one ton. The clock pushes time westward in increments of one. A student
gathers endless space in his eyes. My mind is made of small golden chains. Too
many hands on the world. Invisible forces shape the poem as much as what is
there.
Outside
the driveway, the acacias explode into sunlight; the teachers asks why the kids
are so crazed. The air, laden with honey needs no explanation. My desire more
focused; I want to offer my breasts up in a gesture that is timeless. A man
hauls branches to the field, their dark shapes inscribe the sky with a random
hope for a spring that will never come. The incense of smoldering apple
clippings, like the fragrance of blossoms trapped in wood. Another European
settler, the apple. We even brought bees to this continent. From the cradle of Mesopotamia,
the acacia, once revered as a sacred wood, no longer frames our doors.
A
flock of crows in the bare branches seem out of place—too large and too dark.
They are winter’s memory, the darkness of the soil. A triad of horses; the appaloosa’s
flecked coat, like the reverse images of stars. Hungrily, he pulls at weak
winter grass that creates a deeper hunger, and is not satisfied. The word satiated is related
to satisfaction. The Greek word
for witness is martyr. The
reintroduction of the horse to the Americas almost saved the Indians. President
Woodrow Wilson married the great-granddaughter of Pocahontas. I read Chief
Seattle’s letter to President Harding to to my young students. We talk of differing
world views, and write our own poems to the earth, to the distant drumming of hammers.
What will nourish their children?
I
don’t stop to take photos; too late for this valley—a slice of Americana
threatened by the encroaching estates. Only poems to outlast memory. Perhaps a
daughter of the developers, hungering for something more, will read them and
ask, “Daddy, what happened to the mustard fields blooming as far as the eye could
see? Where does memory go when there’s nowhere left to go?”
2/27/92
Higham Family School
Tuesday, February 25, 1992
NATIVE AMERICAN WOMAN SPEAK
NATIVE AMERICAN WOMAN SPEAKS:
—for Gene Ruggles
Sitting
like Buddha, Mary
TallMountain was the guardian,
a black triangle on a vast white plain.
Both solid, and non-solid, her hair, a living bridge
uniting head to shoulder, composed entirely of triangles.
The mantra interspliced dream images of her name. She said life
is a mountain. Sit tall, become the mountain. You are always going
to climb your own highest summit. She demonstrated, by sitting
cross-legged, the importance of strong foundations.
Standing, she could've been taller,
but that wasn't the
lesson.
SF National Poetry Week
Friday, February 21, 1992
Looking Forward, Looking Back: Interview with Ann Woodhead 2/92
LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK:
20 years of Dancing at the Cinnabar Theatre
An Interview with Ann Woodhead (The Paper)
—by Maureen Hurley 2/92
After a dancer worked with the class, a kindergarten student of mine dictated a poem: “If I were king of the universe, I’d dance for a living!” Dance, the most ephemeral and impractical of arts, takes a special kind of vision, or insanity, to choose as a viable profession. Addicted hoofers proclaim they have no choice but to dance—like Gene Kelly who shouts “Gotta dance!” in “Singin’ in the Rain.” It’s definitely not the medium for making big money (unless you’re lucky like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire), it’s usually expensive to stage, so it’s gotta be for love.
Avant-garde modern dancer/choreographer Ann Woodhead fits the bill to a ‘T,’ or should I say to a ‘2,’ since she uses arabic numerals as a structural basis for some of her floorwork. Woodhead’s choreography, which has received solid and artistic critical acclaim on both coasts, and in Europe, has been enthusiastically praised by audiences and critics alike, as sensuous, challenging, and exhilarating. She has been dubbed the “neo-classic” or “post-modern” avant-garde choreographer on the cutting-edge,“stretching the limits (and concepts) of dance” in America. However, staging dance performances is an expensive proposition: Woodhead, who estimates she loses about $2000 per piece, says she doesn’t do it for the money—“Dance is hopelessly impractical, I feel crazy if I don’t perform, but I feel ecstatic when I dance!”
The Sonoma County-based Ann Woodhead Dance Company’s latest production, “Looking Forward, Looking Back,” spans Woodhead’s illustrious 20-year career as a dancer/choreographer in residence at the Cinnabar Theatre in Petaluma. Woodhead, who estimates she has created over 125 dances at the Cinnabar Theatre since she first performed her euphorically sensuous trademark “Spinning Dance,” in the style of Isadora Duncan, where she literally spins out of her top, will include vingettes from several of her older pieces, as well as present a major new work entitled “Short Stories.”
Woodhead commented about the upcoming retrospective: “one piece is the same as it was in the ‘70s—a musical phrase.” When queried as to why she mines past performances for material, the now long-haired (her short punk orange hair was a familiar trademark), Sebastopol dancer exclaimed, “I no longer have a passion for discovering or inventing ‘new’ movement.”
When Woodhead works with dancers, she likes to work with a very tight structural idea, and utilizes a familiar structure, for example, the shape of a number 2, and then asks them to make their own movements through space within the given shape. “I’m facile at making movement, but I’m tired of it, I’m bored by teaching people steps. I teach people forms. Steps are too time-consuming, we don’t have that kind of time.”
20 years of Dancing at the Cinnabar Theatre
An Interview with Ann Woodhead (The Paper)
—by Maureen Hurley 2/92
After a dancer worked with the class, a kindergarten student of mine dictated a poem: “If I were king of the universe, I’d dance for a living!” Dance, the most ephemeral and impractical of arts, takes a special kind of vision, or insanity, to choose as a viable profession. Addicted hoofers proclaim they have no choice but to dance—like Gene Kelly who shouts “Gotta dance!” in “Singin’ in the Rain.” It’s definitely not the medium for making big money (unless you’re lucky like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire), it’s usually expensive to stage, so it’s gotta be for love.
Avant-garde modern dancer/choreographer Ann Woodhead fits the bill to a ‘T,’ or should I say to a ‘2,’ since she uses arabic numerals as a structural basis for some of her floorwork. Woodhead’s choreography, which has received solid and artistic critical acclaim on both coasts, and in Europe, has been enthusiastically praised by audiences and critics alike, as sensuous, challenging, and exhilarating. She has been dubbed the “neo-classic” or “post-modern” avant-garde choreographer on the cutting-edge,“stretching the limits (and concepts) of dance” in America. However, staging dance performances is an expensive proposition: Woodhead, who estimates she loses about $2000 per piece, says she doesn’t do it for the money—“Dance is hopelessly impractical, I feel crazy if I don’t perform, but I feel ecstatic when I dance!”
The Sonoma County-based Ann Woodhead Dance Company’s latest production, “Looking Forward, Looking Back,” spans Woodhead’s illustrious 20-year career as a dancer/choreographer in residence at the Cinnabar Theatre in Petaluma. Woodhead, who estimates she has created over 125 dances at the Cinnabar Theatre since she first performed her euphorically sensuous trademark “Spinning Dance,” in the style of Isadora Duncan, where she literally spins out of her top, will include vingettes from several of her older pieces, as well as present a major new work entitled “Short Stories.”
Woodhead commented about the upcoming retrospective: “one piece is the same as it was in the ‘70s—a musical phrase.” When queried as to why she mines past performances for material, the now long-haired (her short punk orange hair was a familiar trademark), Sebastopol dancer exclaimed, “I no longer have a passion for discovering or inventing ‘new’ movement.”
When Woodhead works with dancers, she likes to work with a very tight structural idea, and utilizes a familiar structure, for example, the shape of a number 2, and then asks them to make their own movements through space within the given shape. “I’m facile at making movement, but I’m tired of it, I’m bored by teaching people steps. I teach people forms. Steps are too time-consuming, we don’t have that kind of time.”
This technique allows dancers to invest in the final product, rather than mirroring her every step. “But, when you lose the people, you lose the dance, it’s ephemeral.” Her modus operandi is to rely heavily upon intuitive approaches, and contact improvisation, drawing from the dancer’s own experiences, thus building a dance piece by the process of accumulation. This process-oriented format reminds me of Stanislavski’s inner-directed approach to acting.
“In Dance” Magazine described Woodhead as “articulate with just the right amount of feistiness, her non-conformity is elusive…. She creates complex, yet deceptively simple pieces that aim at the evocative, rather than the illustrative.”
“Nobody knows what we dancers are doing, dance is too esoteric.” Woodhead laments the general public’s lack of understanding of, and appreciation for modern dance, for which she blames MTV and video. “The odd idea that a dance should be a frontal, frantic 30-second bite of hyper energy—that’s not dance. As a culture, we know less about dance now than before the advent of TV.” She added, “TV has no depth of field, no depth of range, the scale is all wrong. TV trivializes dance.”
“It’s painful to realize the most wonderful dancers cannot bring in a full house. I keep thinking—if only I just did this better, they’d get it. I’ve had to let go of that.” But she is obsessed by the quest for absolute truth in dance movement. “Your body is honest, whether or not you are. I’m after the right movement for this moment, the truthful, authentic movement for the times. Forget about being original, try to be truthful.”
The 50-year-old choreographer compares her structural approach to dance more akin to musical scores and notation, than to language. “I think like a musician, versus a playwright or painter. I never try to tell a story. Language tends to get in the way of dance; poetry and dance often makes a bad mix.” Woodhead said she has only used a poem once to evoke a dance piece, “Copperhead” from a poem by West Marin poet Linda Gregg. She is intrigued by forms about time and space. “Space is very easy for me. I don’t know that much about time. Space is a musical concern. Dance is conscious movement through time and space.”
Originally a native of Santa Barbara, Woodhead studied piano and cello. Like Ginger Rogers, Woodhead excelled in social, or ballroom dancing, and the only other option, ballet, held no appeal. “It had no relationship to dance.” Then one day noted avant-garde choreographer and modern dancer Merce Cunningham taught a master class at Woodhead’s high school, “I was blown away, it was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”
But it wasn’t until her mid ‘20s, at an age when most ballet dancers retire, Ann found her calling. “I realized I was a dancer.” Married at 16, she entered U.C. Riverside as a math major. Divorced and remarried at 22, with two babies by 23, Woodhead migrated north to San Francisco, and survived by writing textbook copy, and taking dance workshops whenever she could.
Woodhead admits her training as a dancer is unconventional. “I have no credentials, except those I’ve created—no, those I’ve forged,” she added. Woodhead discusses the powerful influence German Expressionism had on modern dance; she studied with many noted dance masters including Merce Cunningham and Anna Halperin. She acknowledges both Jennie Hunter as a mentor teacher, and Erick Hawkins (Martha Graham’s choreographer-husband) as the most technically influential. Woodhead debuted her first production in 1969.
When I asked her how she, a dancer, in need of a city to perform and survive, arrived in Sonoma County’s clement backwaters, she quipped, “How else—by following a man.” The relationship fizzled, she loved living in the country, but needed a means to survive, and a good performance space.
Sonoma State University offered Woodhead a job, and the Cinnabar Theatre, formerly an old church, provided the space—the rest is, as they say, ‘her story.’ In the summer of 1972, Woodhead performed her first piece (“Spinning Dance”), founded the very successful Mercury Moving Company in 1973, and in 1980 she formed the Ann Woodhead Dance Company “in order to pursue my choreographic interests more intensively.”
Dean of Performing Arts at Sonoma State University, Woodhead is unconventional, she holds no degrees in dance, but has a M.A. in psychology. Seventeen years of teaching has nourished her performance career (as well as paid the bills), it allows her to constantly move and experiment. Teaching spurs on her choreography. One of the trade-offs in teaching is giving away energy, and finding a balance between being teacher and artist (she sees 100-150 students, six classes, four days a week). “I can get creative on their dances, but I’m giving it away.”
If Woodhead was living in the midwest, or New York, she says her work wouldn’t be any different. Woodhead doesn’t feel she’s bound by regionalism. “My concerns are formal, location is not important. I see very little dance—though my tastes have broadened considerably. Avant-garde is nothing new.” But there’s some trouble living in paradise—and outside the mainstream of the dance world, largely an urban art form. A choreographer in a big city has more options, more funding, less work to publicize. Though even in the Big Apple, it’s hard times for dancers. At one point, Twyla Tharpe, tired of trying to secure funding, disbanded her internationally famous troupe.
Woodhead despises the system used for getting grants, in spite of the fact that she has been very successful at it. She received several grants and awards for her work, including two National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer fellowships, a Sonoma County Foundation fellowship, and a Sonoma County Arts Achievement Award. “Funders want five-minute video tapes; my dances take 20 minutes! I hate toadying for money, I feel defiled by it. Funding on the basis of quality is a joke, it’s about fashion, trendiness, who’s currently popular.” She thinks a lottery system would be a fairer approach, but she readily admits she’s not good at working within the system.
Woodhead cites other trade-offs of living in the country: a lack of public and corporate funders and presenters, little or no publicity, or press coverage, rare reviews, and a scattered, and small audience as major deterrent. “It’s not a very innovative to me for dance right now. It’s tough, it’s never been a gold mine. I’ve survived by teaching. I’m lucky, I do have an audience, I’m able to raise some money.” Her salary from SSU supplements her career as a dancer and choreographer. Expenses include dancer’s salaries (there are 8 in her troupe) , rent, musician, printing, photos, costumes often leave her in debt after the show closes.“There’s very little praise or financial reward for what we do.”
“It’s hard times for modern dance, there’s not enough serious dancers coming up through the ranks.” She added, for young people willing to take the artistic vow of poverty today, “living on the edge is harder to do, because being poor is so much scarier now than it was in the ‘70s.”
Woodhead continued, “aerobics has killed us.” Those who used to take dance classes for pleasure and exercise, forsook dance for the trendy fitness phase, but they’ve discovered their bodies can’t keep it up. Some are returning to the more ergonomically sound techniques of dance, and aerobics teachers are beginning to use dance in their exercise programs.
Woodhead briefly talked about the role of the older dancer. With the exception of superstars like Margo Fontaine, who is cosseted, Woodhead is a pioneer in the field of the aging of American dancers. “We modern dancers always have to make our own work. I ache every morning, my feet always hurt, mornings are hell, I’m literally too stiff to roll over. (Ibuprofin is a dancer’s best friend .) I succumbed to dance. I’m not young, I’m not skinny, but, hey, I’m still dancing.”
The red-headed dynamo claims she’s basically lazy—a paradigm if ever there was one. The secret to her success? 90 percent of the magic is just showing up at the studio every day, says she. “The rest is improvisation.”
“Dance the first art form, not even sound can happen without movement. Movement is the mother of arts, the source, it remains the most completely human of the arts.” She gets more praise as an actor without any “acting chops. Our literalness is what separates us from actors; acting is not real, it’s illusion, while dance is truth.
One of the joys of transcribing these print articles is that I can provide links, and articles that weren't available to me when I wrote this piece. I was dancing with Ann four days a week at Sonoma State during the late 1970s. We were required to watch videos of other dance companies. Thus began my training to write this piece which appeared in The Paper. I have no publication date for this piece, just this file that said 2/92—but that was the date I last "saved" it onto a floppy disk, not its origin date. I think it's written during the late 1980s—I quoted a line from a kidpoem that came from Mark West School where I was teaching poetry in the mid-1980s. I think this piece was published in The Paper during Nick Valentine's reign as editor). —MH
Links for further reading:
DANCE: THERESA DICKINSON AND ANN WOODHEAD (1983 NY Times)
“In Dance” Magazine described Woodhead as “articulate with just the right amount of feistiness, her non-conformity is elusive…. She creates complex, yet deceptively simple pieces that aim at the evocative, rather than the illustrative.”
“Nobody knows what we dancers are doing, dance is too esoteric.” Woodhead laments the general public’s lack of understanding of, and appreciation for modern dance, for which she blames MTV and video. “The odd idea that a dance should be a frontal, frantic 30-second bite of hyper energy—that’s not dance. As a culture, we know less about dance now than before the advent of TV.” She added, “TV has no depth of field, no depth of range, the scale is all wrong. TV trivializes dance.”
“It’s painful to realize the most wonderful dancers cannot bring in a full house. I keep thinking—if only I just did this better, they’d get it. I’ve had to let go of that.” But she is obsessed by the quest for absolute truth in dance movement. “Your body is honest, whether or not you are. I’m after the right movement for this moment, the truthful, authentic movement for the times. Forget about being original, try to be truthful.”
The 50-year-old choreographer compares her structural approach to dance more akin to musical scores and notation, than to language. “I think like a musician, versus a playwright or painter. I never try to tell a story. Language tends to get in the way of dance; poetry and dance often makes a bad mix.” Woodhead said she has only used a poem once to evoke a dance piece, “Copperhead” from a poem by West Marin poet Linda Gregg. She is intrigued by forms about time and space. “Space is very easy for me. I don’t know that much about time. Space is a musical concern. Dance is conscious movement through time and space.”
Originally a native of Santa Barbara, Woodhead studied piano and cello. Like Ginger Rogers, Woodhead excelled in social, or ballroom dancing, and the only other option, ballet, held no appeal. “It had no relationship to dance.” Then one day noted avant-garde choreographer and modern dancer Merce Cunningham taught a master class at Woodhead’s high school, “I was blown away, it was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”
But it wasn’t until her mid ‘20s, at an age when most ballet dancers retire, Ann found her calling. “I realized I was a dancer.” Married at 16, she entered U.C. Riverside as a math major. Divorced and remarried at 22, with two babies by 23, Woodhead migrated north to San Francisco, and survived by writing textbook copy, and taking dance workshops whenever she could.
Woodhead admits her training as a dancer is unconventional. “I have no credentials, except those I’ve created—no, those I’ve forged,” she added. Woodhead discusses the powerful influence German Expressionism had on modern dance; she studied with many noted dance masters including Merce Cunningham and Anna Halperin. She acknowledges both Jennie Hunter as a mentor teacher, and Erick Hawkins (Martha Graham’s choreographer-husband) as the most technically influential. Woodhead debuted her first production in 1969.
When I asked her how she, a dancer, in need of a city to perform and survive, arrived in Sonoma County’s clement backwaters, she quipped, “How else—by following a man.” The relationship fizzled, she loved living in the country, but needed a means to survive, and a good performance space.
Sonoma State University offered Woodhead a job, and the Cinnabar Theatre, formerly an old church, provided the space—the rest is, as they say, ‘her story.’ In the summer of 1972, Woodhead performed her first piece (“Spinning Dance”), founded the very successful Mercury Moving Company in 1973, and in 1980 she formed the Ann Woodhead Dance Company “in order to pursue my choreographic interests more intensively.”
Dean of Performing Arts at Sonoma State University, Woodhead is unconventional, she holds no degrees in dance, but has a M.A. in psychology. Seventeen years of teaching has nourished her performance career (as well as paid the bills), it allows her to constantly move and experiment. Teaching spurs on her choreography. One of the trade-offs in teaching is giving away energy, and finding a balance between being teacher and artist (she sees 100-150 students, six classes, four days a week). “I can get creative on their dances, but I’m giving it away.”
If Woodhead was living in the midwest, or New York, she says her work wouldn’t be any different. Woodhead doesn’t feel she’s bound by regionalism. “My concerns are formal, location is not important. I see very little dance—though my tastes have broadened considerably. Avant-garde is nothing new.” But there’s some trouble living in paradise—and outside the mainstream of the dance world, largely an urban art form. A choreographer in a big city has more options, more funding, less work to publicize. Though even in the Big Apple, it’s hard times for dancers. At one point, Twyla Tharpe, tired of trying to secure funding, disbanded her internationally famous troupe.
Woodhead despises the system used for getting grants, in spite of the fact that she has been very successful at it. She received several grants and awards for her work, including two National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer fellowships, a Sonoma County Foundation fellowship, and a Sonoma County Arts Achievement Award. “Funders want five-minute video tapes; my dances take 20 minutes! I hate toadying for money, I feel defiled by it. Funding on the basis of quality is a joke, it’s about fashion, trendiness, who’s currently popular.” She thinks a lottery system would be a fairer approach, but she readily admits she’s not good at working within the system.
Woodhead cites other trade-offs of living in the country: a lack of public and corporate funders and presenters, little or no publicity, or press coverage, rare reviews, and a scattered, and small audience as major deterrent. “It’s not a very innovative to me for dance right now. It’s tough, it’s never been a gold mine. I’ve survived by teaching. I’m lucky, I do have an audience, I’m able to raise some money.” Her salary from SSU supplements her career as a dancer and choreographer. Expenses include dancer’s salaries (there are 8 in her troupe) , rent, musician, printing, photos, costumes often leave her in debt after the show closes.“There’s very little praise or financial reward for what we do.”
“It’s hard times for modern dance, there’s not enough serious dancers coming up through the ranks.” She added, for young people willing to take the artistic vow of poverty today, “living on the edge is harder to do, because being poor is so much scarier now than it was in the ‘70s.”
Woodhead continued, “aerobics has killed us.” Those who used to take dance classes for pleasure and exercise, forsook dance for the trendy fitness phase, but they’ve discovered their bodies can’t keep it up. Some are returning to the more ergonomically sound techniques of dance, and aerobics teachers are beginning to use dance in their exercise programs.
Woodhead briefly talked about the role of the older dancer. With the exception of superstars like Margo Fontaine, who is cosseted, Woodhead is a pioneer in the field of the aging of American dancers. “We modern dancers always have to make our own work. I ache every morning, my feet always hurt, mornings are hell, I’m literally too stiff to roll over. (Ibuprofin is a dancer’s best friend .) I succumbed to dance. I’m not young, I’m not skinny, but, hey, I’m still dancing.”
The red-headed dynamo claims she’s basically lazy—a paradigm if ever there was one. The secret to her success? 90 percent of the magic is just showing up at the studio every day, says she. “The rest is improvisation.”
“Dance the first art form, not even sound can happen without movement. Movement is the mother of arts, the source, it remains the most completely human of the arts.” She gets more praise as an actor without any “acting chops. Our literalness is what separates us from actors; acting is not real, it’s illusion, while dance is truth.
One of the joys of transcribing these print articles is that I can provide links, and articles that weren't available to me when I wrote this piece. I was dancing with Ann four days a week at Sonoma State during the late 1970s. We were required to watch videos of other dance companies. Thus began my training to write this piece which appeared in The Paper. I have no publication date for this piece, just this file that said 2/92—but that was the date I last "saved" it onto a floppy disk, not its origin date. I think it's written during the late 1980s—I quoted a line from a kidpoem that came from Mark West School where I was teaching poetry in the mid-1980s. I think this piece was published in The Paper during Nick Valentine's reign as editor). —MH
Links for further reading:
DANCE: THERESA DICKINSON AND ANN WOODHEAD (1983 NY Times)
GOLDFISH IN WINTER
GOLDFISH
IN WINTER
someone
drops some marbles.
Next
to the lazy slant of books
easing
towards the horizon,
the
calendar has its own agenda
in
the rhythm of days.
Trapped
behind glass, solarium plants:
impatiens
and begonias smolder
against
dreary winter clouds.
goldfish,
like small birds,
rush
up a dark ladder to the sky.
When
we hauled branches
to
the field for burning
their
dark shapes scratched the sky
with
random hope for a spring
that
will never come.
2/21/92
Higham family school
Higham family school
Wednesday, February 19, 1992
WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
At oblique angles to the rain,
the blinds divide the sky into sectors.
Below an American flag,
a single crutch on the carpet,
gloves, a knapsack, the hat, empty of thought.
The clock pushes time westward in increments of one.
We are all one people proclaims a poster.
A student gathers endless space in his eyes.
The alarm in my mind is made of small golden chains.
Filing cabinets achieve another kind of order.
Sometimes it seems there's too many hands on the world.
Whose job is it to make the sun rise?
Asleep in winter, the fan no longer severs
the air, offering it some chance of rest.
The rooster gives credit where credit is due.
2/92
POEM FOR SARAH
POEM FOR SARAH
While Sarah sits working her poem
into the metaphoric depths of elm trees,
she sheds words, more like a flurry
of buckeye leaves into the fire of summer.
Aestivating, pooling precious water
during the annual drought, the buckeye is tough,
knows when to conserve, how to pull back—
Innate structure cannot be taught.
I warn my students the verb “to be”
engulfs poems like a black hole.
A builder of hidden realms, the beetle
devours the inner thoughts of the elm.
Because only the thin cambium layer is alive,
& has no defences against the small engineer
boring into the dead heartwood,
the hefty elm, riddled with rot, will fall
during a storm several years hence.
Sarah's name sounds like wind
in the elm leaves of summer.
I want to tell her of Daphne's escape
from the hunter,
that I witnessed her mother's grief
for the baby sister who died in the fire,
& the streets of Russia are lined with trees.
Though she strives to be the towering elm,
sap coursing through her capillaries,
she is also the architectural beetle,
excavating into the very center of self.
No drought or dryrot will weaken her
because she grows from the inside out,
shedding the unnecessary foliage,
gaining strength with each new line.
2/19/92
1996 Voices Israel
published in CPITS anthology NAME?
While Sarah sits working her poem
into the metaphoric depths of elm trees,
she sheds words, more like a flurry
of buckeye leaves into the fire of summer.
Aestivating, pooling precious water
during the annual drought, the buckeye is tough,
knows when to conserve, how to pull back—
Innate structure cannot be taught.
I warn my students the verb “to be”
engulfs poems like a black hole.
A builder of hidden realms, the beetle
devours the inner thoughts of the elm.
Because only the thin cambium layer is alive,
& has no defences against the small engineer
boring into the dead heartwood,
the hefty elm, riddled with rot, will fall
during a storm several years hence.
Sarah's name sounds like wind
in the elm leaves of summer.
I want to tell her of Daphne's escape
from the hunter,
that I witnessed her mother's grief
for the baby sister who died in the fire,
& the streets of Russia are lined with trees.
Though she strives to be the towering elm,
sap coursing through her capillaries,
she is also the architectural beetle,
excavating into the very center of self.
No drought or dryrot will weaken her
because she grows from the inside out,
shedding the unnecessary foliage,
gaining strength with each new line.
2/19/92
1996 Voices Israel
published in CPITS anthology NAME?
Sunday, February 9, 1992
Journal entry, 2/9/92, SSU art exhibit
2/9/1992 last night, Svietla translated Valera’s letters at the Art from the Heart exhibit. I had three pieces in the show, two photographs and one oil pastel. All three sold and I met each of the new owners. They sold for around $30-$45 each. Patricia Finnegan, mother of one of my students, brought bought my sperm-cunt piece, the lava shadow. A friend of Janet Bankovitz bought my pastel, Hearttrash Hotel. It was a gloomy show, I didn’t like most of the art, but I did manage to get three T-shirts for my efforts. A stranger, a woman bought my volcano piece. I told her about the eclipse, and hiking out across the hot lava, my boots melting. I imagine the stories I tell them and then meeting them will color their perceptions when they hang the art on the wall. I imagine my art hanging in white halls, not well lit, the guests have arrived and the hostess takes their coats. They stop to admire the pieces on the wall. She stops in front of mine and tells the story… How many houses do my pieces of artwork hang in? The urge to get my art out into the public on a yearly basis, two or three pieces at a time, slowly adds up.
Monday, January 27, 1992
Survival Strategies for the New Year 1/27/1992
GETTING ALONG—shopping for the basics in an open market, Cherkassy, the Ukraine.
The Allegorical Model
by Maureen Hurley
Returning from Russia to the fast-paced English-speaking world of 10-second sound bites and blaring headliner, only to face a belt-tightening recession back home, I was shocked to find that the USSR had officially dissolved. Gorbachev was ousted, and the Byelo-Rus capital of Minsk, the new Soviet Commonwealth capital. In Russia, nothing as clearly defined—even in the minds of political leaders; the pluralistic model was in full operation.
I found myself thinking of Russia in allegorical terms: three blind men variously describing an elephant as a snake, a wall, and a tree trunk. They were all partially correct or they had limited perceptions, dependingon which model you used to define elephants.
The Soviet media weren't being deliberately mis-infrormational, but so much was in turmoil, it wasn't clear what the outcome would be. But if was clear that when Bush acknowledged our recession after the fact, that Soviet survival strategies might apply here as well.
I'd compare Russia to the scientific model of chaos where many ordered and predictable patterns make up the whole—like the constellations in the infinite cosmos. But the apparent order is based on illusion.
I'd compare Russia to the scientific model of chaos where many ordered and predictable patterns make up the whole—like the constellations in the infinite cosmos. But the apparent order is based on illusion.
It is a logical habit to draw conclusions: we in the West differ from our Soviet neighbors; we gather subjective analysis, call it statistics, claiming to understand the bigger picture. But it's hard to see the picture. let alone the overview while blindly groping to comprehend a culture in the midst of major political and sociological upheval.
The Russian poet Yevgeni Yevteshenko wrote of Perestroika: "One of the few joys of life is being an eyewitness to history in the making." Well, we are witnessing multiple histories in the making.
In Marshall McLuhan's global village context, I muse at how much the West influences, and shapes the outcome of world events. In their quest to nail down a decisive historical moment demarking the end of Communism, the media keeps on replaying the same old symbols and touchstones until we've all become weary of the Velvet Revolution before it's over—or even begun—in this case.
Yes, it's true about the long lines in which the average Sovilet spends an estimated one-quarter of his life. I did some serious time in those lines. Paradoxically, Soviet store shelves are empty, but people's cupboards are full.
The Russian poet Yevgeni Yevteshenko wrote of Perestroika: "One of the few joys of life is being an eyewitness to history in the making." Well, we are witnessing multiple histories in the making.
In Marshall McLuhan's global village context, I muse at how much the West influences, and shapes the outcome of world events. In their quest to nail down a decisive historical moment demarking the end of Communism, the media keeps on replaying the same old symbols and touchstones until we've all become weary of the Velvet Revolution before it's over—or even begun—in this case.
Yes, it's true about the long lines in which the average Sovilet spends an estimated one-quarter of his life. I did some serious time in those lines. Paradoxically, Soviet store shelves are empty, but people's cupboards are full.
Every place I lived, food was stashed in nooks and cranies. Onions rolloed out of the storage closets. By my sleeping cot, hot tub-sized jar vats held whole tomatoes and eggplants gurgling in brine. There were so many bars of soap stashed under the the iron claw bathtub, I couldn't see its legs. In articipartion of a long siege, newspapers were stacked to the ceiling of the watercloset for our more literate heines.
At the State-run Universe Supermarket on Prospekt Chodozhnikov (Artist's Prospect), in Leningrad—I mean St. Petersburg—I had ample time to admire the symmetry of the rows and rows of apple-juice jars artfully to arranged fill the otherwise empty shelves, a la Warhol. The problem of shopping for food a exacerbated by the ration-coupons (talloni) needed to buy produktii (staples): sugar, flour, kasha, oil, butter, kielbasa, vodka, cigarettes, eggs. and meat.
Toilet paper, matches, soap, etc., are always in high demand, but is there a shortage because people chronically hoard the items or because them isn't enough to go around? Many items are in scarce supply because of their excellent barter value. If someone needs soap or toothpaste, they don't go to the store, they ask friends. Friends are everything in Russia.
Most Soviet workers earn less than 20 rubles a day; the average monthly salary runs from 300 to 1000 rubles. With 100 rubles to the dollar, one can live on U.S. pennies a day, but there's very little to buy in the stores. For those who harve plenty of rubles (or hard currency dollars), there's always food to be had. Valuta, or hard currency will buy imported food at the tourist stores.
But Russians, who are not allowed in the hard currency stores, boycott the bazaars and cooperatives, where staples can be bought for a steep price. Usually four an 100 times higher than in the artificially priced state-run goverment stores. Enterprising merchants, anticipating shortages, keep the prices so high that the food literally rots on the shelf before anyone can afford to buy it.
I've been to the USSR three times; it could easily be three separate countries, my experiences are so varied. Russia has to be visited again and again to be understood, and even then, she is elusive. A friend, poet Marina Ajaja, and I who were in the same cities at the same time, had stories so vastly different, it was hard to believe we were talking about the same place.
Travel allows us to don the persona of another existence, don another political-cultural system. Nothing, not even experience, prepares one for the culture shock upon returning home—it's always a rough transition, no matter how much I appreciate gourmet lettuce, designer cookies, chardonnay, toilet paper, or my own bed (not necessarily in that order). While I was in Russia, certainly the proverbial fat got trimmed from my diet, but I always ate everything in front of me, not knowing what my next meal would bring.
Seeing my own country through transplanted Soviet eyes, two things struck me: how naive and blundering Americans are, and the overabundance here—the excess. I literally screamed when I entered Safeway my first week back. Why was it all so screamingly red and yellow? An avalanche of food overwhelmed me, and the ambient noise split my skull right down the middle.
Having lost some Christmas gifts at the St. Petersbueg airport (posters coveted by a Finnair worker), I went to the Santa Rosa Mall on Christmas Eve to find my brother a warm shirt. Contrary to what the media reported, hardly a soul was doing last-minute shopping. I couldn't bring myself an buy anything. I was on a Soviet value system—a bargain $19 shirt was equivalent to a half-year's Russian wages.
Closing time at Macy's found me wandering aimlessly through the store touching things. Senesory, deprivarion does funny things to the psyche. All those months of seeing empty shelves, and a lack of the constant bombardment from the advertising world, left me temporarily immune to our biggest social disease, blatant consunerism. What I noticed was the amount of stress we willingly subjugate ourselves to on a daily basis in the from of advertising. Nothing is new, natural, or improved. Get over it.
I came home to a recession, the media informed me. This is news? I thought that was why we went to war in the Gulf, to boost the economy. I read that GM is to lay off 74,000 workers in the next four years: IBM to lay off 20,000, with another 20, 000 to fall beneath the axe next year. Retail jobs vanishing.
Something about President Bush buying his socks at K-Mart, the significance of which, escapes me. There's a mini baby boom. Desert Stork, a cranberry shortage in the Bay Area, and Sunnyvale city officials were offering Monopoly Money or Hell Bank Notes to the gods at the winter solstice bonfire. The country I left was pretty crazy, but we Americans were facing some pretty tough questions of mammoth proportions (mammoth is a Siberian word), like "Is there life after Communism?"
In the new Russian Commonwealth, when Yeltsin officially takes over on Jan 2, prices are expected to quadruple. The prices (and wages) have been held at an artificially low price for 40 years. If wages don't rise, many Soviets I know won't be able to eat. Since there are so few luxuries to be had, they can't trim their budgets there.
How are people here in America are cutting corners to survive these bad times? Some say they're getting by—by refinancing their homes, and buying only the bare necessities. Many North Coast residents who moved to the land 20 years ago are less hard hit by the current recession, but others, whose children have come of college age, find themselves commuting to Santa Rosa and beyond to bring home the bacon. For folks used to cutting corners, what's left to trim after rice and beans?
Others are mobilizing by organizing a series of self-help groups and public lectures to strategize and combat the recession. One group is offering women free seminars on financial planning strategies for the '90s.
Financial consultant Zara Altair of IDS/American Express, Santa Rosa, said the planning sessions have been well attended. "People overlook daily expenses, few know how much they spend on food, gas, lunches, movies, cafe mochas or the cleaning bill." She advocates prioritizing, systematically trimming daily expenditures (lunch at $4.50 a day adds up to $90 a month), and putting money aside for the future. Women typically control about $500,000 in their lifetimes.
Altair said economists work with allegorical models, using the best of possible worlds. There's a dichotomy of information when they say we're in a slow recovery pattern, for in reality we don't feel the impact—it's like blind men looking at the elephant. While U.S. rates have been dropping, European Community rates are rising. Either we've already hit bottom, or it's going to get worse.
"Financial planning is like winnowing the spending stream," explained Altair. "if you look at thinning out the schools of minnows, it's the opposite of the elephant allegory. Look at all these things that nibble away at your financial strength. You begin in take toward by examining everything you do, and that prepares you to make intelligent choices."
I thought the idea of financial planning was great, but wondered what advice would help the many West County folks, including myself who already live with the metaphorical belt tightened in the last notch?
At the State-run Universe Supermarket on Prospekt Chodozhnikov (Artist's Prospect), in Leningrad—I mean St. Petersburg—I had ample time to admire the symmetry of the rows and rows of apple-juice jars artfully to arranged fill the otherwise empty shelves, a la Warhol. The problem of shopping for food a exacerbated by the ration-coupons (talloni) needed to buy produktii (staples): sugar, flour, kasha, oil, butter, kielbasa, vodka, cigarettes, eggs. and meat.
Toilet paper, matches, soap, etc., are always in high demand, but is there a shortage because people chronically hoard the items or because them isn't enough to go around? Many items are in scarce supply because of their excellent barter value. If someone needs soap or toothpaste, they don't go to the store, they ask friends. Friends are everything in Russia.
Most Soviet workers earn less than 20 rubles a day; the average monthly salary runs from 300 to 1000 rubles. With 100 rubles to the dollar, one can live on U.S. pennies a day, but there's very little to buy in the stores. For those who harve plenty of rubles (or hard currency dollars), there's always food to be had. Valuta, or hard currency will buy imported food at the tourist stores.
But Russians, who are not allowed in the hard currency stores, boycott the bazaars and cooperatives, where staples can be bought for a steep price. Usually four an 100 times higher than in the artificially priced state-run goverment stores. Enterprising merchants, anticipating shortages, keep the prices so high that the food literally rots on the shelf before anyone can afford to buy it.
I've been to the USSR three times; it could easily be three separate countries, my experiences are so varied. Russia has to be visited again and again to be understood, and even then, she is elusive. A friend, poet Marina Ajaja, and I who were in the same cities at the same time, had stories so vastly different, it was hard to believe we were talking about the same place.
Travel allows us to don the persona of another existence, don another political-cultural system. Nothing, not even experience, prepares one for the culture shock upon returning home—it's always a rough transition, no matter how much I appreciate gourmet lettuce, designer cookies, chardonnay, toilet paper, or my own bed (not necessarily in that order). While I was in Russia, certainly the proverbial fat got trimmed from my diet, but I always ate everything in front of me, not knowing what my next meal would bring.
Seeing my own country through transplanted Soviet eyes, two things struck me: how naive and blundering Americans are, and the overabundance here—the excess. I literally screamed when I entered Safeway my first week back. Why was it all so screamingly red and yellow? An avalanche of food overwhelmed me, and the ambient noise split my skull right down the middle.
Having lost some Christmas gifts at the St. Petersbueg airport (posters coveted by a Finnair worker), I went to the Santa Rosa Mall on Christmas Eve to find my brother a warm shirt. Contrary to what the media reported, hardly a soul was doing last-minute shopping. I couldn't bring myself an buy anything. I was on a Soviet value system—a bargain $19 shirt was equivalent to a half-year's Russian wages.
Closing time at Macy's found me wandering aimlessly through the store touching things. Senesory, deprivarion does funny things to the psyche. All those months of seeing empty shelves, and a lack of the constant bombardment from the advertising world, left me temporarily immune to our biggest social disease, blatant consunerism. What I noticed was the amount of stress we willingly subjugate ourselves to on a daily basis in the from of advertising. Nothing is new, natural, or improved. Get over it.
I came home to a recession, the media informed me. This is news? I thought that was why we went to war in the Gulf, to boost the economy. I read that GM is to lay off 74,000 workers in the next four years: IBM to lay off 20,000, with another 20, 000 to fall beneath the axe next year. Retail jobs vanishing.
Something about President Bush buying his socks at K-Mart, the significance of which, escapes me. There's a mini baby boom. Desert Stork, a cranberry shortage in the Bay Area, and Sunnyvale city officials were offering Monopoly Money or Hell Bank Notes to the gods at the winter solstice bonfire. The country I left was pretty crazy, but we Americans were facing some pretty tough questions of mammoth proportions (mammoth is a Siberian word), like "Is there life after Communism?"
In the new Russian Commonwealth, when Yeltsin officially takes over on Jan 2, prices are expected to quadruple. The prices (and wages) have been held at an artificially low price for 40 years. If wages don't rise, many Soviets I know won't be able to eat. Since there are so few luxuries to be had, they can't trim their budgets there.
How are people here in America are cutting corners to survive these bad times? Some say they're getting by—by refinancing their homes, and buying only the bare necessities. Many North Coast residents who moved to the land 20 years ago are less hard hit by the current recession, but others, whose children have come of college age, find themselves commuting to Santa Rosa and beyond to bring home the bacon. For folks used to cutting corners, what's left to trim after rice and beans?
Others are mobilizing by organizing a series of self-help groups and public lectures to strategize and combat the recession. One group is offering women free seminars on financial planning strategies for the '90s.
Financial consultant Zara Altair of IDS/American Express, Santa Rosa, said the planning sessions have been well attended. "People overlook daily expenses, few know how much they spend on food, gas, lunches, movies, cafe mochas or the cleaning bill." She advocates prioritizing, systematically trimming daily expenditures (lunch at $4.50 a day adds up to $90 a month), and putting money aside for the future. Women typically control about $500,000 in their lifetimes.
Altair said economists work with allegorical models, using the best of possible worlds. There's a dichotomy of information when they say we're in a slow recovery pattern, for in reality we don't feel the impact—it's like blind men looking at the elephant. While U.S. rates have been dropping, European Community rates are rising. Either we've already hit bottom, or it's going to get worse.
"Financial planning is like winnowing the spending stream," explained Altair. "if you look at thinning out the schools of minnows, it's the opposite of the elephant allegory. Look at all these things that nibble away at your financial strength. You begin in take toward by examining everything you do, and that prepares you to make intelligent choices."
I thought the idea of financial planning was great, but wondered what advice would help the many West County folks, including myself who already live with the metaphorical belt tightened in the last notch?
But in the end, there's little comparison between American consumers coping with the recession, and our Soviet neighbors; materially we are much better off. They've been in an economic, downspin for many years—like 75 years. And we don't have to wait in ration lines at the state-run stores every night because we can't afford food at bazaars where a week's groceries cost more than a month's salary.
A neighbor, Pat Bond, commented that the recession in the United States serves to heighten people's insecurities—especially those of people already on the fringe. She said, "Letters to the editor read like a permanent full moon. The government isn't telling the truth; it encourages corruption." She said the Forestville Methodist church had swelled from 250 to 600 converts since the Gulf War. A retired scientist, she's one of the converts. "l want to believe that the world is friendly," she added.
Soviets, too, are flooding to the churches en masse; I've never seen so many baptism and marriages. But in spite of AA, that number of Soviets who find faith in the bottle also seem to have risen to an all-time high, judging "growing number of blind-drunks in the metros. Cologne and raw ethanol provide temporary respite from a living hell when there are no more vodka ration coupons to be had.
Unfotunately, we, like the Soviets, have fallen victim to the idea of inherant helplessness. One of their biggest failings is that of not knowing how, or when to take the initiative. They haven't discovered that democracy requires constant vigilance and hard work.
We in the West could set a better example, instead of mumbling about how we need to carpool, to recycle, to cut back on heating and the electric bill, the goodies and all the toys.
The kings of Siam once gave white elepharts to troublesome courtiers who in turn, suffered financial ruin trying to to support their royal beasts of burden.
Only five percent of the global population, we Americans consume the vast majority of the world's natural resources, and the upkeep of elephants (or SUVs) is depressingly expensive these days. Soviets routinely recycle waste, use car pools and public transportation.
Are we the role model for emerging nations like India and China who want to blindly emulate our worst habits, that of blatant disregard for the earth's limited natural resources? Maybe now's the time to put our lack of money where our mouth is, and perhaps the world will be a better place for elephants.
© 1992 Maureen Hurley
Page 4, The West Sonoma County Paper, January 27- February 5, 1992.
Page 4, The West Sonoma County Paper, January 27- February 5, 1992.
Sunday, January 26, 1992
Teaching journal, 1/26/92 LBC, CAC, Dream Vessels
1/26/92 I finished our El Día de los Muertos class with Inga Laskowski yesterday. Some 14 kids returned on a Saturday, a three-day weekend, to take a hour-long workshop which was heartening, a miracle. I never had faith in the after school, or a weekend workshop idea, but I can see that it’s working. I also had a little faith in the organization of it as well, but it worked out fine.
We did more freewrite and a group poem as well as letter poems. The group was a little more scattered and didn’t achieve the quality I had hoped for from the letter poems, but the objective was to get some poetry,.,. Hopefully it all goes with the portraits. It’s very hard to get good work and only two sessions.
I read translations of the poems etc. to the class. Rocio Nunez writes of her mother’s death, of her drunken father, and her brutal sister-in-law. Her pain and fierce determination to survive is extraordinary. I will never leave school, she says. A heart wrenching and superb writer. She writes of Calaca, Lady Death, lovely images of birds, a real gift she has. This is why I teach.
Afterwords, Inga looked at my travel photos of Russia, Peru, Ecuador, I haven’t been able to look at my South American photos since John Oliver Simon and I broke up, which is a bit jarring. I wasn’t feeling well as I had some trouble sleeping and my eyes feel like sandpaper. I think I have a touch of that virus or a sinus infection.
Friday was a loss. I met with John Marquitos of John Reed School to discuss a California Arts Council Grant, it’s iffy and it’s due on February 7, with the Witter Bynner grant due on February 1. I’ll know more on Tuesday whether or not I have a CAC sponsor. I got a nibble at Monte Rio school if John Reed falls through, but it’s not exactly enough time to plan a residency at this point.
I sent out 20 letters the first week of January and only got four responses, all on schools I expected, With the exception of Alexander Valley School. Probably no poetry at John Reed this year, he wants me to do a mural but that will require some research and I’ll have to do a bid as well. This is the second mural job I’ve been offered. The first one only had a $500 budget so I can’t imagine doing a mural for that amount now. There’s a lot of logistics involved like coordinating the kids, researching their history, coming up with a design, etc. So much to do.
I reread my November to June 1990 journal from the beginning—it was filled with doubt about Oleg, I accidentally opened it to the same day as yesterday, one year earlier and it’s interesting to look back at the space of the year to see where I was. I certainly was sick a lot last winter, a clue that something was wrong.
Some interesting writing too, especially on the Gulf War, which was I want to type up. I think it will help with my Dream Vessels poems. The IRS is breathing hard down on my neck and I want to work on my Dream Vessels poems and send out some work and everything is to do, doo, due.
Saturday, January 25, 1992
Dream journal, 1/25/92 USSR
1/25/92 I was reading my dream records and I was surprised to see that many of the elements came true, more or less. One year later, those dreams about Russia for example, most notably the changing blue and green sign I saw in Red Square. In the dream I’m with Oleg Atbashian, in real life it was with Valera Stupachenko. They put a an electronic bulletin board in the windows of GUM since I’ve last been to Red Square. I stood in front of it thinking I was in a déjà vu dream, not recalling the particulars of the dream. So, when I read about it, I was very surprised. I had a lot of déjà vu experiences when I was in Russia. The dreams usually occurred a year and advance, that’s why I don’t remember much about them. It’s almost as if I simultaneously lived an entire life out each day in the course of a year.
Maybe we are only on this earthly plane a year at a time and so we live alternate lives, continuously recycling the year down to the end. Other Russian images that were either too generic to pinpoint, or didn’t come true, with the exception of my helping an older woman, by offering my arm, she was recognizably Lydia from our business trip. Lots of dreams about getting ready to go to Russia, buying coats, sweaters, etc. Of course there’s always a group but there’s always a group involved in the USSR so that’s not exactly prophetic.
Maybe I need to pay attention to the strangers that I meet in dreams, because that’s the stronger indication of a déjà vu than anything else. Certainly I’ve met Valera before in dreams. That was well over a year in advance, Another theory shot, but it was the right time of year. I first remembered the Valera dream, was in 1989 before I went to Russia or I had even met Oleg, for that matter.
The images of people speaking in a language with lots of ZH sounds like Portuguese but not quite, it was obviously Russian, upon rereading. I recognize dream images. Even the icons were there except the dreamscape was like the coast of California instead of Russia. That threw me off. I could I couldn’t make headway with it. How was I to know I would meet Valera at Fort Ross, of all places?
It’s hard to be objective but I’d like to more accurately see, so I can record the events. None of the actual images came through, with the exception of the I’m tired and want to sleep In church scene, a composite, the images were more metaphoric, than not. The problem is is I cannot remember much upon waking, then the dream is lost forever, unless I can record some imperfect meager scrap. Building, reconstructing the pieces is the actual déjà vu process, I guess reshuffling the images and the order of events, renaming the inarticulate descriptions, I can only record to the best of my ability. And that is colored by my linear consciousness. Call it dream pollution, but sometimes I’m able to capture an image in spite of it all. A tantalizing tidbit, enough to tease, but not enough to satisfy.
Maybe we are only on this earthly plane a year at a time and so we live alternate lives, continuously recycling the year down to the end. Other Russian images that were either too generic to pinpoint, or didn’t come true, with the exception of my helping an older woman, by offering my arm, she was recognizably Lydia from our business trip. Lots of dreams about getting ready to go to Russia, buying coats, sweaters, etc. Of course there’s always a group but there’s always a group involved in the USSR so that’s not exactly prophetic.
Maybe I need to pay attention to the strangers that I meet in dreams, because that’s the stronger indication of a déjà vu than anything else. Certainly I’ve met Valera before in dreams. That was well over a year in advance, Another theory shot, but it was the right time of year. I first remembered the Valera dream, was in 1989 before I went to Russia or I had even met Oleg, for that matter.
The images of people speaking in a language with lots of ZH sounds like Portuguese but not quite, it was obviously Russian, upon rereading. I recognize dream images. Even the icons were there except the dreamscape was like the coast of California instead of Russia. That threw me off. I could I couldn’t make headway with it. How was I to know I would meet Valera at Fort Ross, of all places?
It’s hard to be objective but I’d like to more accurately see, so I can record the events. None of the actual images came through, with the exception of the I’m tired and want to sleep In church scene, a composite, the images were more metaphoric, than not. The problem is is I cannot remember much upon waking, then the dream is lost forever, unless I can record some imperfect meager scrap. Building, reconstructing the pieces is the actual déjà vu process, I guess reshuffling the images and the order of events, renaming the inarticulate descriptions, I can only record to the best of my ability. And that is colored by my linear consciousness. Call it dream pollution, but sometimes I’m able to capture an image in spite of it all. A tantalizing tidbit, enough to tease, but not enough to satisfy.
Tuesday, January 14, 1992
HARDEDGE LINES fragments
Besides these words,
what beast has escaped
to wrap me in mobius strips?
Einstein was right,
gravity bends light.
Feeling guilty
for switching lovers
we say the moon's in void.
Lunar dust and wind-chill factors.
Light askew in the heavens.
The blizzard of truth
loosened in this room
strikes only once like lightning
smoking pistoleros—
a column of hard stone,
honest and blue.
Though no longer in love with the idea of love,
I still crave chocolate in late afternoon.
Freudian slip. Freud was a cross-dresser.
What does he know of the incestuous relationships of poets?
When I said nothing happened,
she didn't want to believe me or to be made a fool of.
Then asks, is it serious, should she bow out?
I awoke saying Remember Safeway!
& of course, I couldn’t remember it.
Who is responsible for this anyway?
The Tonight show
will not be shown tonight
& we bid you good night.
At Nicasio Reservoir I stood naked in the moonlight
A black man with a fishing pole
wearing a Santa hat climbed the bank.
No fish. This is not the north pole in May.
I stand transfixed in this place like the orbit of stars.
some of these lines became short love poems
Tuesday, December 31, 1991
MATIN
MATIN
(a brief telephone conversation from the other side of the world)
Stricken by the binary division of male and female,
last night I burned translucent amber. Sacrifice.
In the air above our heads, an aurora borealis
alive with blue light, the rosiated sky timeless, & of no age.
Solar winds entered our crowns, our last chakra,
we tumbled like leaves across the autumn bed.
Our morning eyelids bathed in red corpuscles
dancing between membrane and cornea.
Reflections on stone, clearer than blood.
The time we didn't have, thick sacramental wine.
Someone said the art of compromise,
not conflict—is the basis of civilization.
Somewhere inside all of this, another story is waiting.
We come into this world innocent
only to be toughened by life's school—
What separates us from ourselves and from each other?
It makes me think this trouble goes deeper than culture.
Someone said, it's the men who suffer most of all—
We wonder why there's so much trouble in the world;
we can't even build a bridge to meet half-way.
We keep diminishing love,
as if love and pain were stillborn Siamese twins.
Guilty beasts rising up from within the self,
we felt bound to each other, and to time;
we became our own worst enemies.
I burned the precious resin more ancient than Man,
because to find a love that endures is rarer still.
In the fire surrounded by fire, on dawn's watered cusp,
your voice is distorted by phone lines—Sunspots.
Satellites, precocious star sounds, the cackle of deep space.
The path of the corona extends to the limits
of the solar system as solar wind.
Each ring of the bell, a matin of the heart,
a prayer wheel and flag for all our tresspasses.
As in the fairy tales, we'll mourn
the obligatory year and a day.
But I can't answer those bells yet—your voice,
as if from the dead, still argues from within.
1991 date? Who is it to? Oleg? Bruce?
rev. 5/92
House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad
House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad
by Madelon Sprengnether (Author) , C.W. Truesdale (Editor)
Amazon 2nd ed. listing, has my name, but no link
I had NO idea that it even went into a 2nd edition in 1997, and a 3rd printing!
Well, I guess have a first edition, then.
My story Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace, was picked up by Black Dog & Leventhal (Workman) in 2001. Writing the Rails: Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers by Edward C. Goodman (Author). Alas, it was remaindered right after it came out, right before 9/11. I never did get to do an author reading at Barnes & Noble. I will publish more info on this in 2001 entry.
Well, I guess have a first edition, then.
My story Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace, was picked up by Black Dog & Leventhal (Workman) in 2001. Writing the Rails: Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers by Edward C. Goodman (Author). Alas, it was remaindered right after it came out, right before 9/11. I never did get to do an author reading at Barnes & Noble. I will publish more info on this in 2001 entry.
Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace / Maureen Hurley p. 179
I do not have an electronic facsimile of my story. Only way to get it is to scan pages, but I've no OCR software. I may scan pages direct. —MH, 2014
From Publishers Weekly:
The nearly 50 short pieces of travel writing that comprise this volume display such a wealth of perspectives and explore such a variety of locales that the book is a splendid adventure in its own right. In "Ramont Hall" Rhiannon Paine looks back to 1973 when, at the age of 25, armed with a broken umbrella, a "dilapidating Mini" and youthful enthusiasm, she set out to see England. Helen Degen Cohen, who, as an eight-year-old Jewish girl narrowly escaped being deported to a concentration camp, describes her "Return to Warsaw" to visit the Catholic woman who hid her during World War II. Patricia Hampl's "Italian Two-Part Invention" savors the romance of a damp Venetian winter; a visit to a monastery during one sunny Umbrian spring triggers a memory of the author's childhood. Melissa Sanders-Self's fictional "Nameless Things" follows the daily grind of a young American woman who serves drinks in a Tokyo club that caters to Japanese businessmen. Catherine Stearns's "Icarus in Africa" is a series of letters from a feisty woman who signs herself "Ma" and who, at 60, starts out to teach at a rural school in Zambia. Sprengnether wrote Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreamsone title and Truesdale is publisher of New Rivers.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Madeline Sprengnether
 |
| House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad |
From Publishers Weekly:
The nearly 50 short pieces of travel writing that comprise this volume display such a wealth of perspectives and explore such a variety of locales that the book is a splendid adventure in its own right. In "Ramont Hall" Rhiannon Paine looks back to 1973 when, at the age of 25, armed with a broken umbrella, a "dilapidating Mini" and youthful enthusiasm, she set out to see England. Helen Degen Cohen, who, as an eight-year-old Jewish girl narrowly escaped being deported to a concentration camp, describes her "Return to Warsaw" to visit the Catholic woman who hid her during World War II. Patricia Hampl's "Italian Two-Part Invention" savors the romance of a damp Venetian winter; a visit to a monastery during one sunny Umbrian spring triggers a memory of the author's childhood. Melissa Sanders-Self's fictional "Nameless Things" follows the daily grind of a young American woman who serves drinks in a Tokyo club that caters to Japanese businessmen. Catherine Stearns's "Icarus in Africa" is a series of letters from a feisty woman who signs herself "Ma" and who, at 60, starts out to teach at a rural school in Zambia. Sprengnether wrote Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreamsone title and Truesdale is publisher of New Rivers.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Madeline Sprengnether
Friday, October 4, 1991
STELLA MARIS freewrite
STELLA MARIS
It's 5 am, Venus and Jupiter in conjunction with Jupiter,
someone says the star of Bethlehem
on the eastern horizon, new crescent moon
in the old moon's arms star of the sea.
I remember
sleepwalking to the front door
awakening to find a configuration like this
celestial bodies, the planets are aligning
themselves
venus in the moon's halo appears to be holding the
new moon
and holding the old moon in her arms
Venus Stella Maris I awoke naming the planet by its Latin name
where did that come from? I was baptized at the Star
of the Sea
church. Some say it's really 1993 years since the
birth of Christ
some priest or another got it all wrong way back
when
the millennium is approaching at lightning speed
how many time since the year zero, or 3 ad
have Venus and Jupiter crossed paths
of course, everything's relative
it's what we see from here, this place.
that we designate as the most auspicious of signs
above me, Orion's belt suddenly i remember
a pictograph I'd seen somewhere
was it New Mexico, Hawaii
the small man dancing on the horizon
I recognized Orion. The names of stars
arabic and greek interpretations
thousands of years after the naming
what were the Hawaiian names
or the Indian names for the
constellations?
The Pleiades directly overhead
the Celtic new year. The night sky takes on a
significance
in my subconscious
I am recognizing a passage of time
our creators were more finely aattuned
to the movements of the stars
now we're lucky if we can even see them;
the
lights of the cities
a common denomonator for the madness
that sits within the absence of ritual
biological clock finely attuned to the measurements
of seasons
the equinox another rare celestial event full moon
equinox
and hunter's moon in one Paleolithic beginnings
haang from that orange orb
is it merely pollution that makes it orange?
I remember the August eclipse moon over Kiev
not knowing it was an eclipse
I watched the moon bleed in to the evening sky,
1989
In less than a week I'll be traveling to Kiev again,
my 3rd trip to the USSR in as many years
this morning I'm off to Montana
listening to Tracy Chapman singing Mountains of
Pain.
October 4/1991
Uh-oh a lot of ascii at the bottom—never a good sign
Thursday, October 3, 1991
Making Things: Artist Raymond Barnhart 10/5/91
Assemblages by Sebastopol Artist Raymond BarnhartTHE SUM OF ITS PARTS— Barnhart outside his Sebastopol work space with one of his "relief constructions," Consummation. "I want to please the work. I want it to please itself."
We asked the captain what course of action to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously: "I think I shall praise it." —Robert Hass, Praise
BY MAUREEN HURLEY
I recalled the twist on reality and an unexpected visit from poet Bob Hass' poem, Praise while viewing Sebastopol artist Raymond Barnhardt's latest exhibit, "Recent Constructions" at the California Museum of Art in Santa Rosa, California.
Because everyone's response to my queries about Raymond Barnhart and his work was the inevitable raised eyebrow, followed by an incredulous: "You mean you don't KNOW about Raymond Barnhart's illustrious career?" I gulped, and found that the best recourse was to praise it. Taking the beast by the horns—by asking Barnhart niggling details about his second career as an assemblage artist (painting was his first career) seemed sacreligiously inane and so unintelligent. Excuse me, your slip is showing...
And so, at a recent artist's lecture at the California Museum of Art (CMA), when the venerable artist himself was introduced by museum director Duane Jones as "Someone who needs no introduction," I thought, aww feck, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was right: "You can only ask questions and die." Luckily, the lecture was a quorum of questions ranging from "How do you name your art?" to "What kind of power tools do you use?" The questions were all answered by Barnhart, age 88, with such thoughtfulness, verve and wit, I was in love with love itself.
Artists know firsthand that one of the challenges in art and poetry is to create something that is profound, but with a sense of humor. One who can accomplish both—without lessening the impact of the statement—is a Master. Barnhart's elegant, formal masterful assemblages are intentionally playful, they delight the eye, they make you want to laugh.
And so, at a recent artist's lecture at the California Museum of Art (CMA), when the venerable artist himself was introduced by museum director Duane Jones as "Someone who needs no introduction," I thought, aww feck, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was right: "You can only ask questions and die." Luckily, the lecture was a quorum of questions ranging from "How do you name your art?" to "What kind of power tools do you use?" The questions were all answered by Barnhart, age 88, with such thoughtfulness, verve and wit, I was in love with love itself.
Artists know firsthand that one of the challenges in art and poetry is to create something that is profound, but with a sense of humor. One who can accomplish both—without lessening the impact of the statement—is a Master. Barnhart's elegant, formal masterful assemblages are intentionally playful, they delight the eye, they make you want to laugh.
Conceptual artists make us look at ordinary things in a new way, they redefine our limited perameters of "definition." It comes down to rearranging concrete nouns into metaphor—Plato's nemesis. The metaphor of Picasso's bicycle seat and handlebars as a bull's skull. Man Ray's steam iron with nails, and Christo's running fence—all share that spirited kinship to challenge the senses and reality. How we see the world.
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