Imbolc offering to Brigid, simultaneous saint & goddess, ca. 2000

I made a Celtic scarf as a prop for finals in my MA MFA playwriting classes on monologue at San Francisco State University in 2000. Making the scarf went off without a hitch, after a lot of research, I banged the drawing out in about 45 minutes, and another hour or so for painting it with dye. The pin I was using to hold it in place, slid off during my monologue, and Justin Chinn dinged my performance for a costume fail. It was a class monologue reading for fucksake, not a public performance. He was an absolutely horrid teacher, resting on recent minor theatrical accolades, and he should never have been teaching. The class was a required waste of space, so I called him on it. He gave me a C-minus for the class. I fought the low grade and won. But the A-minus dropped my entire MA/ MFA perfect GPA to 3.9. May he rot.

I also simultaneously used the St. Brigid scarf for a final in my Celtic studies class with Professor Dan Melia at UC Berkeley. I came to class dressed as the goddess/St. Brigid, so it must’ve been around Imbolc, February, 1, 2000, as I began the long poem in October of 1999. I’m not too sure where the poem came from, as it was something that literally possessed me, written in a fugue, augmented with facts—after the fact, as it were. Probably because I was devouring medieval Celtic timelines, including the Annals of the Four Masters, so my brain was oversaturated. I wish I had kept a first draft of the poem as the original might have given me a way back to the source, and an entirely different revision might have evolved. But without that long-winded piece of didacticism, the scarf would’ve never came to be. Art works in mysterious ways.

For my Brigid costume, I made a halo of twelve candles (with little battery operated Xmas lights) I was dressed in purple robes, a green Celtic shawl for a cape, a kirtle with all her symbols attached to the costume, including a poem, an iron horseshoe, a candle, and a rubber chicken, I read a poem monologue, and prepared a traditional Celtic feast for the class. Salmon, bread, and beer as she was the goddess of bread making, and beer making. Dan sniggered and said, you can’t bring alcohol to class, pocketing the Guinness for later. I got an A-plus. Sadly, I don’t have a clear in-focus photo of the scarf when it was fresh.

BRIGID/BRIGIT  A triune goddess of:

1) healing                             (therapy)

2) blacksmiths                    (fire)

3) fertility & poetry  (light—poets/seers, divination, prophecy)

Poetry fragments from Marin Juvenile Hall

I am the spark of inspiration

I dream the stars of the galaxy

into being.

1/10

Sometimes when the mood is right

I will take a wrong turn on purpose,

and allow myself to get a little more lost

on winding back roads.

Not knowing where I am is part of the thrill.

My eyes, drunk with joy.    

1/24    

My heart is like a glacier

slipping down the mountain

seeking the solace of the sea.

  

1/31

Inside my heart is a field of darkness,

mist rising from the folds of the hills,

Seeking the blue throat of the sky,

to quench its prodigious thirst.

It becomes the hawk guarding the chickens.

It beats its wings against the cruel morning,

Seeks flight on the far horizons

where clouds hide the gathering storm.

1/31

My Maureen Hurley Art blog is now live

I've been developing a blog collection of my art work. I’ve still got a long way to go, with only 135 posts (some revert back to this writing blog—meaning I haven’t moved them over yet—mostly because I don’t have accessible jpgs). Blogger jpgs are tiny and you can’t directly lift them from an iPad. But you can lift low resolution jpgs from a laptop, by dragging them to the desktop.

Some posts host as many as ten art pieces, depending upon the medium. I tend to work in a series, or medium format: for example, a wet pastel jag, or an aquarelle jag, etc. I will eventually need to replace some poor jpgs—provided that I still have the work. In some cases, a bad jpg was all that survived. But it's a start.

Art is listed by media type, and by category. Most of my early work was destroyed, so in many cases, it comes down to bad jpgs (digital camera was in its infancy ca. 2000), or nothing at all. Work may seem uneven, but it really boiled down to what had survived the onslaught of technology, time and floods. Pretty much everything from my College of Marin and Sonoma State days was destroyed. Not to mention all my ceramics. Who knew that those daily Facebook Memories posts would yield so many salvageable jpgs, a snap to save to my iPad, then upload to the blog. It makes me positively giddy with joy.

At the bottom of the Blogger page there's a link to access the older posts, it goes in about 5 pages worth. Or you can navigate by month, which is much less useful as I don't know what month I made some  pieces, let alone, the year. Onward, as they say.

Next up is to create a photo blog. Any recommendations? I’ve been looking at many blogs for ideas. I really like Morrie Camhis (sp) photo blog. If only Blogger would develop some new templates. But as I write this, Blogger has finally updated the long in tooth app format. Meaning it’s a little easier to use it on the iPad. It was a nightmare, and there were no decent Blogger apps in the App Store.

Maureen Hurley Art blog 

https://mohurleyart.blogspot.com

WRONG ROADS

Sometimes when the mood is right
I will delliberately take a wrong turn,
and allow myself to get a little more lost
on winding back roads.
Not knowing where I am
is part of the thrill.

Wrong roads become the right roads.
My eyes, drunk with joy.

CLEAN UP CREW (haiku)

CLEAN UP CREW

Bald-headed vultures—
Death Star congress recruiting
in the hinterlands.

Poem was

Two turkey vultures—
Death Star captains recruiting
on a country road

NO RESERVATIONS

Turkey vultures line
up at the roadside cafe
for raccoon special.

The dungheap

The ancient cow listlessly lipped scraps of hay by the barn. Well into her second childhood, she was long in tooth and horn. But she had given the best years of her life to the family tucked inside the farmhouse. She helped raise two generations of children. The family couldn’t bring themselves to get rid of her. After all, she had given them her life. They couldn’t bring themselves to send her to the boneyard, or the stockyard either. She was mostly skin and bone, not much there left to eat. Perhaps some stew bones and something for the dog. As summer drew to an end, you could see the old cow struggled with each step. The arthritis had settled into her hips. She could no longer navigate the steep hill to the richer pastures. Thinking this was her last year, they brushed her they stroked her petted her gave her treats. Apples and small carrots from tiny hands, a gift more than the world itself. Some mornings they found her trying to navigate the dungheap. As the days grow colder the dungheap grew taller. They thought perhaps she had long since left her second childhood behind, and was moving into the third age. She kept negotiating that dungheap until she forged a trail to the top. Mornings they would find her at the top of her domain, overlooking the yard, lying in the steaming dung. She wasn’t such a dumb cow after all. She knew the score. There was warmth in that dungheap and it lasted the whole night long. Soon enough, she was joined by the young heifers wanting in on the action.  Mornings the farmer would find them perched like enormous ravens on top of the dung heap.

Turkeys on the rocks

Photographer Jerry Downs posted photos of what he called native wild turkeys, assuming they’d been in California for centuries. I said, Well, if you consider Texas native, so be it. Wild turkeys are so wiley, Ben Franklin wanted to make them the national bird. The bald eagle was an afterthought. But they’re not native at all, they’re transplants, shills, stand-ins for the native California turkey that went belly-up, dead—as in extinct, not sleeping it off—during the Pleistocene—that’s the last Ice Age. And this is why you should always drink your wild turkey on the rocks.

Rambling on about Rambling Jack

Yep, Ramblin Jack is still alive and well and living in West Marin. He may be pushing 88, but he’s not exactly pushing daisies just yet. He may also not have been a real cowboy by birth, but he is a cowboy of the heart. Still cruising the back backroads in his big blue Dodge truck, he takes it slow. I remember when he used to live in Forest Knolls. He wasn’t so much the country boy back then, but he sure liked girls on horseback. If he wasn’t half cocked, he was generally half-lit. Before I was working for Mimi Fariña at Bread & Roses, I ran into him at a concert, at San Francisco State, in 1974, where nobody showed up, so we all hung out in the cafeteria. Hoyt Axton was hunkered down, with his sledgehammer hands performing a strange CPR to the formica tabletop. I remember sitting at that circular coffee table on its singular iron leg, as they swapped yarns, their knees lifting the small table off the ground, as if it was levitating from the sheer exuberance of all the collective tall tales being told as they outdid themselves and each other. I was a fly on the wall mesmerized into muteness. That iron claw foot was scratching the floor, was screening, and wailing like a monster—tidal waves of coffee splashing in our cups. Their hands thrumming hoofbeats into the proverbial sunset. Move along, little dogies, move along.

The Human Be-In

I was at the Human Be-In with my mother, I was just turned 14, barely into my teens. It was a gloriously sunny, if cold day, and the grass was damp. There were flowers and candles, incense and feathers, cymbals and chimes—and lots of smoke. 

Gary Snyder, in a fringed leather vest, was on stage chanting and reading poetry, Allen Ginsberg was standing behind him with Michael McClure dressed in black. Lenore Kandel. My first Beat poetry reading. (I later met, and read with all of them). It was a gathering of the tribes, and the wild tribe kept growing all afternoon, from a thousand souls to a crowd of 30,000 people converging on the polo fields, and the bands played on.

See the royal maze website that mentions John Cooke

 

Court jester Timothy Leary, all dressed in white, leaped off the stage, tumbled down among the masses, tripping down the main aisle like a pied piper, he spotted my mom, a tall willowy auburn-haired beauty, and bear-hugged her. They knew each other from before. It’s an Irish thing. She was always bringing the Irish poets home like Lew Welsh and Gene Ruggles. He solemnly shook my hand. And smiled beatifically.

Photo by Jim Marshall, from San Francisco Remembered. With thanks to Janet Duncan

As they twirled and hugged, she threw back her head and laughed, her long red mane combusted in the sunlight. I’d never seen her so radiant as in that moment. She was like another person, not depressed. She said, God bless you Timothy Leary, he laughed and drifted onward toward the back of the crowd, creating hives of excitement whenever he stopped. Jerry Garcia was onto a long guitar riff. Bubbles danced in the breeze. Me, awkwardly standing there in soggy rain-soaked pants, taking it all in, never dreaming I’d one day become a writer.

Big Brother and Janis Joplin lived down the road from us in Forest Knolls, Sons of Champlain, Jefferson Starship, Grateful Dead, and Carlos Santana also lived in the San Geronimo Valley so the musicians were all neighbors of sorts. I later met most of them hitching back and forth to high school. My mom took it up a notch, sometimes she took me in tow when she partied with them.

San Francisco, January 1967, was an electrifying year of social deconstruction and reconfiguration. The Gathering of the Tribes where spiritual generation amassed for a Human Be-In at the Polo Fields. Guest speakers Ram Dass and Timothy Leary spoke to some 10,000 very stoned pilgrims who turned on, tuned in, and dropped out en masse.

And yes, there really was a psychedelic poster. I remember it. Someone said that if a poster had the year on it, then it was fake. Whether this one is real, is moot.  The point is, we were there.

HOUSE MADE OF SHELLS

Rien se perd, tout se récupère?
Chaumière aux coquillages de st. Jacques.
Une halte pour les pèlerins de Compostelle ?

And when it rains,
do the scallops on the roof
endlessly dream of the sea
whispering secrets to those pilgrims
sleeping beneath its eaves.
Won’t it attract seagulls?
Does the rain sing of the waves?
Plenty of time to be afraid of the wind
among the fields of stars
on the road to Compostela.

DYLAN O TONN a cut-up found poem based on Mary Oliver's West Wind #2

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center Challenge

Prompt #29 (for January 12th, 2020)
Because I couldn’t imagine myself compiling a set of NYPC prompts without including a Mary Oliver poem as “combustion” for a poem of your own, I offer one of my favorites. Respond to it/ borrow (i. e., steal wisely) from it in any way you like:

West Wind #2

You are young. So you know everything. You leap
into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and heart's little intelligence, and listen to
me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks -- when you hear that unmistakable
pounding -- when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming -- then row, row for your life
toward it.

Mary Oliver


DYLAN O TONN (an imitation poem)
a cut-up found poem based on Mary Oliver's West Wind #2

Listen, you were too young to know everything.
You fell from the open arms of the boat and begin to swim.
Without fins, without gills, without guile, and the waves
spoke directly to your soul as if you were born to it. Listen
to tide whispering. Lift your slender arms from the water,
orchestrate the oars, let your mind dwell, your heart is an anchor.
Listen to the wind. There is light within the darkness.
Remember to stop for that old coin in the road. It is a song of the past
when trinkets floated like baubles in the tidepools of memory.
When you hear the churn of the sea as it frets and gnaws
the carapaces of jagged rocks—you'll feel that unmistakable
pounding of the waves in the cave—& the pull of home,
you'll witness the endless battle between land and sea,
your soul and the darkness that lies ahead, and the rivulets
plunging and swirling—don't let their ceaseless hunger
mesmerize you—for of you do, you will drown in their sorrow.
You must remember to swim, swim for your life toward the light.

  6/27/20                                —MH

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center New Year’s challenge—all the poetry prompts

I wasn’t quite in the mood to write, too discombobulated, and I had a painting deadline looming over my head. But I faithfully read the prompts, and wrote quite a few out of sequence, making it harder to post the poems under the date written vs. conceived. Sort of like conception followed by birth.

NYPC 11 Prompts

Prompt #1: Greetings, Poets! Okay, here we go…For your first poem—and continuing Gillian’s first-poem tradition to ease us all into this—
Write a haiku for some goodness that has happened to you this year. Feel free to create a haiku series of goodnesses if it’s difficult to choose just one. Ready…steady… go…

Prompt #2: Consider times in our lives when we are at the table, or someone has said, Come to the table. Write a poem for these times, or about the many sorts of tables (dining, negotiating, or even Periodic) we come to —or leave. For inspiration, consider this poem by our current U. S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo: https://poets.org/poem/perhaps-world-ends-here Prompt #3: Write a poem in response to this idea: The Graceful Stumble. This is a prompt from the contest portion of our MoSt 8th Annual Poetry Festival, which will be held on Saturday, February 1st, 2020. The deadline for submissions is Saturday, January 11th, 2020. For more information, go to our website:

https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/8th-annual-modesto-poetry-festival/

Epic Autocorrect fails

Autocorrect sometimes helps me out with hilarious results, by changing my words into something completely different long after I’ve finished typing and posting a sentence. I typed—So that oversexed tortoise is sort of like Niall of the Nine Hostages? And ottocorrect changed that to—Nile of the nine hole stitches? Huh?

On Howard McCord’s post on Puerto Rico, he asked, trump hates them.Wonder why?

I dictated, “yes, his hatred knows no bounds.” But AutoCorrect fixed my words—originally displayed correctly, I might add—then it had its way with me... and wrote: “Yes his hatred no snow balance.”

I have to leave that malaprop stet. I can’t even...

Does AutoCorrect work for Trump? Alexa?

The first example was a case of AutoCorrect changing my typing. The second example, AutoCorrect changed my dictation. I can’t win either way. I’ve long since turned off predictive text. That was too distracting for words. I’ve also turned off helpful capitalization, as it was so off, I spent more time fixing its corrections than writing. It won’t capitalize I, or I’m, but give it a noun, and it’s gloves off. Or an s, and it’s an apostrophe field day. I made the mistake of using the Spanish keyboard once, and now my typing/spelling transgressions are multilingual, adding another dimension to surreal.

Now as I write this, AutoCorrect is literally changing my what I wrote, back and forth, and then completely retyping it again. Erasing everything I wrote, and reprinting it out in long strings of text. I can see a correct version of what I wrote go by, whoosh, only to be replaced by something rather more schizophrenic. I think it’s a combo of Apple and Facebook autocorrect systems attempting to out-compete each other. Make up your mind, AutoCorrect. Or go home, AutoCorrect, you’re drunk. Very drunk.

Another AutoCorrect epic fail. I explained, “What happens is I get shifting focal planes.” Oh my god, that was a brilliant auto correct. It wrote “fuck all planes,” then changed it back. AutoCorrect must have ego (I wrote “egg) on its face. Stet.

Reminds me of the joke about two monks and the scribal typo—celebrate not celebrate. Sometimes I think Facebook is gaslighting us.

I have a scientific cleaning, so I do love reading about things but I try to never click on Web MD no matter how tantalizing the headline maybe. I did it once for hives and then was “played with you to Cario arts” ...  huh?

What I meant  to say was —plagued with urticaria ads. 

Cripes, scientific cleaning? Autocorrect just changed cripes to crimes. Autocorrect is a crime against spelling and word sense. Nonsense, more like. But that last autocorrect fail is so weird, I’m leaving it, stet. Forget obscure words, or a Latin phrase, like ad hoc, fergawdsake.

What happens if...

DANTE’S NINE CIRCLES OF HELL, REIMAGINED FOR LINGUISTIC TRANSGRESSIONS

First Circle (Limbo): Reimagined by Autocorrect

Here wander the otherwise virtuous souls who were forced into grievous errors by autocorrect programs. They sit in silent masturbation, only rising once every hour to chant eerie koans such as “ducking auto cat rectal.” McSweeney’s

Mis-musing on the name of Kenneth Mac Alpine

Someone in our British Medieval History group, wanted to know why Kenneth MacAlpin, (ca. 800 to 858) the first King of Scots, was also called  "king of the Picts". Was he a Pict who gained the Dal Riata/Gael throne, or the opposite?

Moderator Peter W Graham (whom I adore), said:

Probably of mixed parentage his mother being PICT and father a Dalriada Scotti, it is believed that the pict crown passed through the female line , the Scotti through the male, after the royal families of both were decimated by invading Norse Kinnaed was the most senior of both lines left, ignore the slaughter of the nobles it’s a myth. The Picti and Scotti were forced to unite under him against a common enemy and found the kingdom of Alba.

And of course, I was off and running. I said that Kenneth’s name was not Pictish, but Irish. Cináed mac Ailpin, which means the fire born one, possibly the son of that devotee of Colm, or Columba Aka Malcolm. (No K in either form of Gaelic). Pictish was a Brythonic language, like Welsh, so the very word son, or Mac designates the name as a Goidelic language. Welsh word for son is is mab, or ap. Alpin is likely  Pictish, as p was avoided In early Irish, a loan letter. Some think Alpin was Ailpein, Albin, or possibly alba, or alp.

Peter replied, Well Gaelic Scot and Irish had already started to separate. That got me going and I fell down the rabbit hole (again).

I said Early medieval Scots Gaelic and Northern Irish Gaelic were closely related Goidelic dialects, with Donegal Irish being the closest mutually comparable connection. Despite the fact there were probably about five separate Irish Gaelic (and Scottish) dialects, the grammatical rules don’t change much. (Spelling is another matter entirely.)

I found this on a medieval Scotland site: The nominative, Mael Coluim, Mal Coluim, Mal Colum, Mal Coloum, was spelled Maíl Choluim, or Mal Colaim in the genitive form. So, spelling was variable according to grammatical changes. The references are from Kenneth Jackson’s The Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer.

Kenneth's origins are uncertain, as are his ties, if any, to previous kings of the Picts or Dál Riata. Among the genealogies contained in the Rawlinson B 502manuscript, dating from around 1130, is the supposed descent of Malcolm II of Scotland. Medieval genealogies are unreliable sources, but many historians still accept Kenneth's descent from the established Cenél nGabráin, or at the very least from some unknown minor sept of the Dál Riata. The manuscript provides the following ancestry for Kenneth:

...Cináed son of Alpín son of Eochaid son of Áed Find son of Domangart son of Domnall Brecc son of Eochaid Buide son of Áedán son of Gabrán son of Domangart son of Fergus Mór ... —Wiki Kenneth MacAlpin, Rawlinson ms B502

Máel is a devotee, or follower (of Christ), and Colm is a dove, pronounced Colum. So Máel+Colm is Malcolm. Máel (pronounced mal) was sometimes also used as a prefix to a Welsh name, Maelgwyn, and Mael Madog, follower of Madoc. And that Ma- in Madog may be a redundancy, máelmáel. But máel is an Irish prefix suggesting tonsured one, a monk. Which type of tonsure, I’m not sure, there were two warring factions of tonsure styles, the Druidic version was most radical.

Since we were covering goidelic languages, I tossed in some Manx too. Manx, though spelled with phonetic English orthography, was probably similar to Leinster Irish and Galwegian Scots Gaelic. Transcribing Manx into English sounds was a language disaster. Root words were lost as well as case endings, phonetic Gaelic is almost impossible to unpack. When I was looking at Manx tales, I had to say the words out loud in order to make any connection. By contrast I can suss out Scottish Gaelic place names via the Irish without too much trouble.

Also, during  the Medieval era, the term Scottii did not necessarily mean somebody was Scottish, it was a fluid concept—it meant they were Irish, or of Irish derivation—hence the term Dál Riada Scotti. Since Roman times, Ireland has been called Scotia Major, and Scotland was called Scotia Minor until the 16Th c. This simple fact seems to confuse people to no end. For the record, most of Scotland’s saints were Irish born.

Still on an odd language roll, I said: Weirdly, a dialect of Munster Irish was spoken in some of the Hebrides—especially Barra. You’d think with Colm Cille, that copyright thief, hailing from the north of Ireland, the Northern Irish dialect would’ve prevailed throughout the Hebrides. Certainly Iona. Munster Irish is very different than Northern Irish. People got around!

Gilbert Markus  caught me up on my references. I said, yes go raibh maith agat, the first part of the Rawlinson B502 was written down in the 11th c. Sometimes referred to as the Lebar Glinne Dá Locha, just to confuse things. Weren’t the annals of Tigernach later? But those early ms were not the works of sole authors, or authorship as we think of it today—same scribal hand, maybe. Well, two, or three hands. Annalists were responsible for organizing the material, not authors. Historians, maybe. But annalists were not necessary historians. And it was a collective compendium of what was thought to be historically accurate at the time. And yes, whoever was commissioning the ms would’ve had an agenda.

Now, speaking of hidden agendas, and constitutional fictions, the late 16th c. Holinshed's Chronicles was recreated history to shore up certain family trees and political agendas. Take Shakespeare’s MacBeth, for example. Poor MacBeth got seriously slammed. Yes, you’re right, there is not a radical divide between Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Manx other than wildly different spellings, and pronunciation. My Irish teacher was always saying the difference between a language and a dialect is an army.

Well, hello, I just fell down the damned rabbit hole again, lock, stock and bunny tail, chasing the wrong name.

Comparison of Scottish Gaelic and Irish

A Simple Guide to Constructing 

12th Century Scottish Gaelic Names

COUP DE GRÂCE, AFTER BIERSTADT

Looking Down Yosemite Valley (1865) by Albert Bierstadt

COUP DE GRÂCE, AFTER BIERSTADT

When Bierstadt traversed the narrow ledge
up the granite wall, gaining momentum and altitude
with each labored step, in those golden morning hours,
with his sketch pad and pens in his rucksack,
or perhaps a small canvas strapped to a steady mule,
did he hesitate and bow to the sublime beauty
of The Sentinel, the grace of Cathedral Rock
or the sheer grandeur of El Capitán,
did his breath become an ablution
joining the collective prayers of dew and mist
rising from the meadow and river,
was he lulled by the cacophony of snowmelt,
and the silent song of samblind stars
before he rendered it all into artifice?
He was a long way from the Hudson River Valley
and those eastern sensibilities hellbent
on dividing and conquering the land in the name of God.
Did he ponder where to begin
with something so holy and profound,
or how to render that luminous landscape
wrought on such a massive scale, that it defied logic,
into something more civilized and tame,
all that Romanticism distilled
within the stifled confines of the painter’s studio?
Did he know the art salons would become billboards
of despair for the wild untrammeled vistas
when the thundering hordes headed west
to trample and love the sublime places to death?

1/11/2020
Ekphrastic poetry

Protest Songs, a nod to Behan’s Patriot Game vs Dylan’s With God on Our Side

KQED’s editor, Gabe Meline, a former poetry student of mine, not that he would admit it, asked where are all the new protest songs, he was bemoaning the fact that modern musicians are not writing protest songs in the manner of Dylan.

Last week, after escalating attacks on Iran and the president declaring the United States has "God on our side," I couldn't help but think of the lines by Bob Dylan:

One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side

That song, "With God on Our Side," was written over 50 years ago. So where are the new protest songs? It's a question that's surfaced repeatedly in the past four years. And I keep hearing, especially from our younger readers, that it's the wrong question to be asking — that the aesthetics and process of art are political, too, and more effective than earnest sloganeering.

I had to laugh, as the very word slogan, is from the Irish, a war cry. Irish sluagh-ghairm (sluagh "army host" + gairm "cry"). The word slogan from the Old Irish, slúag, and garim, is hardly new, as it appeared in early medieval Irish texts, where Irish folk hero Cuchulain talked about being on the war road.

Whether or not the term slogan entered the English lexicon in the 16th century via Scottish Gaelic, or Irish, is open for conjecture, as most Irish words in the Oxford English dictionary were subsumed and attributed to Scottish Gaelic as the English made a blood sport of negating or discrediting Irish cultural contributions whenever possible.

The great rip off game, as my grandmother might have called it. In the early 1960s my grandmother waited for her beloved radio program where she’d wrap her arms around the radio to give it better reception. I remember her muttering how Bob Dylan stole the Irish song and didn’t give credit where credit was due.

It’s interesting to read the Washington Post article that laments how our current lame protest music is stuck in the past, because the past is exactly where that Dylan song came from. But on some level all art is political. And as to the aesthetics and artifice of art, there is always a moral debt to the past, whether overt, or implied, as to who or what came before us. Art cannot exist in a vacuum. It is always in direct response to modern politics and pop culture. But maybe the newest generation of protest writers are operating out of a vacuum. So looking back to the past is also the way forward. What came before.

Speaking of moral debt, Dylan’s song With God on Our Side was cribbed and adapted from an Irish protest song, The Patriot Game, on the the Irish nationalist struggle after the death of 16-year-old Fergan O'Hanlon during an IRA attack in 1957. The words were written by Dominic Behan, brother of Brendan Behan, and set to a traditional tune "The Merry Month of May" with nary a nod to Behan or the Irish, for that matter.

Behan, who was unequivocal in the defence of his copyright, publicly accused Bob Dylan of plagiarizing "The Patriot Game" in writing his own "With God on Our Side". —Wiki 

To answer Gabe's question why aren’t the young musicians writing decent protest songs about what’s going on right now in Iran, I’d suggest that they take Dylan‘s song and update the words to fit the present tense. After all, it is all part of the oral tradition to borrow and adapt what came before. Dylan would understand. He’d totally get it, right? Payback would be such a sweet bitch.

WRITING ON WATER

WRITING ON WATER

Once I dreamed a poem

so profound

I had to write it down.

I could not wait until morning

but I had no paper, no pen, 

there was no twig, nor sand, 

so I scryed it on the water 

with my fingertip.

The words sank like stones 

to the bottom of the sea 

leaving me speechless in the dark.

When I awoke at dawn

I found an undecipherable scrawl 

stenciled on my nightstand,
a small flowered Richter scale of runes.

1/11/2020

10th annual San Geronimo Valley Community Center senior lunch art show

HOW TO GET BEHIND THE 8-BALL

HOW TO GET BEHIND THE 8-BALL

When life throws you too many fast curves,
and the road to nowhere is treacherous,
you must put your shoulder to the burden
and shove it off the cliff into the sea.
That’s the advice part. Seems simple enough.
But when you’re crippled by grief,
because the pool shark of an ex wants something,
you’re not sure what, it leaves you snookered,
your thoughts are scattered like a bad break-shot,
and that sandstorm of despair comes riding in
like a sweaty apocalypse hellbent on revenge,
so you can barely get out of bed, then what?
Do you abdicate? Rack it up to experience?
Or sink the 8-ball into the wrong pocket
when the money ball is no longer on the table?

1/11/2020

BETRAYALS OF THE MIND MoSt 25

BETRAYALS OF THE MIND

Betrayals of the mind begin innocuously enough,
small warning signs, you pay no heed to,
they’re merely trifles, but they steadily accumulate
until one day you’re on the wrong side of a locked gate,
you misplaced the key long ago, and there’s no spare
to be found anywhere. Not for love, nor money,
nor wishes made of horsehair and remembrance.
Just an attic filled with dying stars,
and an insurmountable debt, that cannot be repaid,
the ritual of hope long since misplaced.

1/18/20

Mt. Tamalpais from Corte Madera, from an old photo, acrylic 6x8” (art)

I have four pieces I can live with, I need two more by Thursday.

Take two. Gallagher Ranch, Black Mountain, Point Reyes, acrylic painting, 8 x 10

Gallagher Ranch, Black Mountain, Point Reyes, acrylic, 11 x 14”

Gallagher Ranch, Black Mountain, Point Reyes, acrylic, 11 x 14. Two down, four more to go... art show deadline Jan 9.

Revised foreground.

Last painting of 2019, Barboni Ranch, Hick’s Valley, West Marin. 8x10” acrylic.

Last painting of the year. Barboni Ranch, Hick’s Valley, West Marin. 8x10” acrylic. The iconic tree and rock formation is just past the one-room Lincoln schoolhouse with the vernal pool nestled in the lower foothills of Hick’s Mountain. Eponymous Tennessee land baron “Uncle Billy” Hicks never lived in the valley, once part of the Rancho Corte Madera de Novato land grant, that was named after him. Arroyo Sausal fireroad is to the right. It might be on one of the Barberoni ranches, preserved by MALT. Maybe Circle B Ranch? The Barbonis were Italian-Swiss, like most of the West Marin ranchers who settled there in the 1880s. Barboni founded Marin Dell Milk. I remember seeing the sign as a kid. Biggest ranches in Marin, 2600 acres, total, now preserved. Lots of rare and endangered species on that ranch including white buttercups in the lone remaining vernal pool, and home to red-legged frogs, badgers, otter.

Hicks Valley, Mountain: An absentee landlord in Marin's early days, William Hicks, left his name with this valley in the ranching area of Marin. (The Marin French Cheese Factory is located here.) Hicks was a native of Tennessee who arrived in California in 1843 and amassed a land empire. In the words of a newspaper reporter in 1884, "His acres, horses and cattle covered a thousand hills." The land stretched over Sacramento, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Sonoma Counties, plus Marin, where in 1855 he bought 4,000 plus acres of Rancho Corte de Madera del Novato for $5,000. "Uncle Billy" Hicks died in 1884 at the age of 67 at his home in Hicksville, Sacramento County, a town no longer in existence. There was a post office named Hicksville, 1860-1889. —Place Names of Marin, by Louise Teather, 1986page 29

Neighboring Thompson Ranch, aka Marin French Cheese factory. Illinois 49er, well 65er, he came late—Jefferson  Thompson built an empire on cheese, supplying buttermilk cheese to the saloons of San Francisco. He wasn’t  French, his children changed the name to  “Rouge et Noir” to make it sound classy. After three generations, the Cheese Factory was sold to Jim Boyce, of Bishop, Ca. When Boyce died in 2010, it was sold to a French family business, Rians. It’s the oldest continuously operating cheese factory in the United States—and bona fide French after 150 years.

1/1/2020

I made a pastel too, 9 x 12” but I don’t like it very much. I need six solid pieces of art by Jan 9, for two upcoming art shows. The pressure’s on.

End of year writing stats 2019

Year-end writing stats. It’s been a rather rough year, some 30 poems, and a baker's dozen of prose poems, that makes 43 poems, so far, out of 101 posts. At first, it was only 89 posts, I despaired, but with the help of Facebook Memories, I was able to glean and a couple dozen more posts—including a few poems that I never posted here. My poetry minimum is 52 solid poems, so I fell behind. Maybe I should count all those haiku separately. However, with the prose poems, I do have about 52 poems total. Make that 60 including prose poems in retrospect. Maybe not such a bad year, after all. Considering.

It’s been a stressful, if busy, year. Still living rough, still living on the run. But determined to stay In the game, firmly anchored in my art. My last refuge, my cousins’ Nicasio house was destroyed on the 4th of July, leaving us homeless (again), and then there was a Sonoma County Kincade Fire evacuation in October. What a nightmare. Both places where I’ve been living, were either destroyed, or under attack. Since the fire, I’ve been living under siege, sheltering in place in an empty house with most of the electricity knocked out, babysitting two desperate cats, making sure the place didn't get looted.

My cousin Dave’s stroke, followed by his marriage to a woman who seemingly reinvents veritas to suit her scenarios, has left me bereft, with no plan B. My car’s on its last legs, and I’m living here, there, and everywhere. So, my car is my lifeline. I carry clothing, art supplies, my electronics, etc.

To make matters worse, my iPad was stolen in April, with myriad photos, and bits of writing that never made it to the cloud. Some April Fool’s joke. I will never see some of that work again.

My cousin Sinead and I took a jaunt to Hawaii to see my friends Dulcie in Kauai, and also Kathie on Oahu. It’s been ten years since I’ve been to Hawaii, long overdue. Lots of photos. And lots of extraordinary outdoor time, circumnavigating the Na Pali coast from the other side, snorkeling, revisiting Waimea Canyon, in Kauai, and circumnavigating Oahu, revisiting my old haunts discovering some new ones on North Shore. Snorkeling again, Hanamua Bay. Not enough beach time, though. then Hawaiian Airlines and American Express double-charged me for the tickets, when I upgraded, and I cannot seem to straighten it out., no matter how loudly I scream. It’s all a vast metaphor for being ripped off in general.

I feel so overwhelmed these days. I can only take baby steps. One foot in front of the other. I’m learning to feel secure within myself during these insurmountable times, living only within the present tense. I’ve had a couple of housesitting gigs, I’m now housesitting in Berkeley through the new year. Respite.

Poems published in the Julia Vinograd memorial anthology.
POEM ON THE PASSING OF JULIA VINOGRAD, STREET POET (2018)
And I have a poem forthcoming in Molly Fisk’s upcoming Fire and Water anthology.
LOVE IN A TIME OF FIRE

I was a featured poet for the Petaluma Poetry Walk, and I also read at Watershed for The Open Mike Slot. I wrote a massive California Arts Council grant for Poetry Flash. all this while living itinerantly.

Ive been a few art shows at the San Geronimo Community Cultural Center, sold a photograph.

Senior art show

Spring art show (poster)

Where We Call Home

Some artwork
Two pastels, Elephant Mountain
Two pastels, Nicasio oak & rock
Spirit Rock (pastel and paintings), White’s Hill
Asbestos angel, assemblage

I made a new art blog to keep track of my art. I need to make one, maybe two for my photos

My Brownie Mary photo is in a traveling exhibit: Weedmaps Weed Museum where it will tour for three years. Someone lifted it from my blog, cut off my name and copyright, and reposted it on a Facebook site where it was massively redistributed, I lost track after 30,000 shares.

Taking stock, old inventories of the past, blog list I’ve been scanning old negatives from the 1980s and 1990s, giving back, as it were. Mostly of poets. I need to find a digital home for my scans, I don’t think Blogger will do. Here are some posts.
Scanning old negatives of the Napa Poetry Conferen...
A gathering of poets, Orange Hill, Nassau Island, ...
For the Bahamas (scans from 1985) (photos)
Giving back old photos
Brownie Mary photo scan

Still on the back-back burner: documenting and photographing my old pottery and ceramics pieces from the 1970s.

Taking stock, old inventories of the past, blog 

PERHAPS A GARDEN MoSt poetry Challenge 12

Vincent van Gogh, Winter (Vicarage Garden under Snow), ca. January 1885, Nuenen

PERHAPS A GARDEN

Vincent leaned into the sound and the sweat 

of shoveling snow, mid-winter 

and despair took on the song of ice.

The sun hung like an ornament in the sky 

but offered little warmth, no surety of its return. 

His breath froze, small crystals formed 

and merrily rang to the ground like a fairy orchestra.

But he couldn’t see that, his mind was always raging 

against the darkness that followed him.

Despite everything, it seemed he was always fighting 

with god or the devil, he would come to find 

there was little to distinguish between the two, 

always and eternally at odds with themselves.

Is he merely shoveling snow, or digging a grave? 

The bare trees and bauchy snow sounded their distress to the sky, 

even the distant town perched on the meniscus of winter 

offered little solace from the grim landscape.

Perhaps a garden dwells beneath that snow 

but the promise of spring is capricious as faith.

1/18/20

Boxing Day, or how the wren was killed

Ireland: its scenery, character etc.(Volume I, S.C. Hall. London:
Virtue & Co., 1843. D. Maclise, engraved by Landells.

Today is Boxing Day, or St. Stephen’s Day, as my grandmother called it. When I was a child, I wondered what pugilists, saints, and tiny wrens had in common. I may have gotten the boxer part wrong. There were no boxers in the arena, or cardboard boxes, for that matter—but there were bad boys involved. She said, the day after Christmas, you boxed up all your food and old clothing and gave it to the poor. A sort of second Christmas.

She then told me the story of how, when she was young, the boys of Bantry would dress in straw and tattered rags, put on masks and parade a dead wren about the town. The wren boys would put the poor bird on a tall pole adorned with ribbons, and evergreens, mistletoe and pine, holly and ivy. Then they’d parade the wee beastie about the village, beating their drums, waving their bullroarers, creating musical mayhem on everybody’s front steps. I was horrified. No, no, not the wren!

As if killing the wren wasn’t enough, gangs of boys demanded a ransom in exchange for a wren’s feather, and collected small coins from everybody in the village to bury the poor bugger. What they did with the money, she never said. Give us a penny to bury the wren. If you haven't a penny a halfpenny will do/ If you haven't a halfpenny/ Well then, God bless you. Apparently the coinage was collected to fund a Wren’s ball sometimes in January. Perhaps for the Epiphany. Boxing Day was the British renaming of the Feast of St. Stephen. Then there’s the Druidic winter feast. So, Wren Day is a triad compromise of faiths and liminal boundaries.

Perhaps to appease me, she said sometimes they caged the wren and then let him go after the festivities were done. I thought maybe she had gotten her stories crossed because what she described sounded suspiciously like Halloween trick-or-treat—with a Christian flair—except for the addition of  the effigy of the wily wren, a rat fink bird (who betrayed St. Stephen, the first martyr stoned to death for believing in Jesus. I had forgotten that part of the story, too grisly and too convoluted to follow.)

She then followed up with another story of how The birds argued who was the king of the birds. The wren and eagle dickered over who could fly the highest. The eagle flew up as high as he could, but the wren, hidden on his back, leapt off the back of the eagle to fly the highest, thus proclaiming himself to be the king of birds. I knew there was a moral imperative embedded in the story, I wasn’t sure exactly what. So I imagined the wren wearing a tiny crown of thorns, of course.

One dreary day, not too long ago, a small wren slipped into the house by the back door. I had a devil of a time catching it, and when I did, it had a lot to say, clearly I was being roundly cursed by a wren, I opened my palm, and let it go, it wasn’t letting bygones be bygones. It fiercely scolded me from the safety of the garden gate as if I were responsible for all that mayhem.

‘Dreoilín, Dreoilín, Rí na nÉan,
Dreoilín a fuaireas-sa thíos ar an inse,
Istigh fé charraig agus carbhat síoda air,
Thugas-sa chugaibhse é, lánúin an tí seo,
Agus má thugann sibh onóir na Féile dom’ Dhreoilín
Le bhur lámha do shíneadh,
Go mbeire an bhliain fé mhaise agus fé áthas arís oraibh.’

The wren the wren the king of all birds,
Saint Stephen's day he got caught in the furze,
Although he is little his family is great,
Cheer up landlady an give us a treat,
Up with the kettle and down with the pan,
Give us some money to bury the wren!

Dreoilín, dreoilín, where's your nest?
'Tis in the bush that I love best
In the tree, the holly tree
Where all the boys do follow me.

Facebook memory, new iPad, 2014

Standing on second base in Nicasio trying to find a cell signal. Nope. New iPad Air 2, 128GB, cellular model. Nicasio baseball diamond, testing out the panorama mode! © Maureen Hurley 2014.

The backstory: for my 60th birthday, friends chipped in to buy me an iPad, but Neil said he was a bit short—could we wait on it? He’d make it up at Christmas. Sure, I said. I wanted all the bells and whistles—the 128GB model with cellular, I was willing to wait. And waited I did—another year. And another. The promise of the new very expensive iPad meant there were no gifts from Neil for my birthday or Christmas for the next two years. None. Just an accumulation of iPad IOUs stacking up. I think he conveniently forgot about it, hoping I wouldn’t press it. Or that I’d buy one myself.

But my friends kept nagging me, asking if I finally bought that iPad yet. I said, but I only received about $45. Nowhere near enough to buy an iPad. Finally, Jane Bark told me how much they each had donated. I was floored. It was a full house. I did the math. Then it dawned on me, rather than give it to me, he had pocketed the money. Scottish, my ass. By then he had conveniently forgotten how much money people had given him, I’m sure.

And I had kept him in Macs and MacBooks that I had bought and refurbished, for nearly two decades. And here he was denying me my iPad. It wasn’t just about being strapped for cash. Something much darker. Finally, I had to resort to a screamfest to shame him into getting that iPad. He handed me his credit card, wanting me to buy the cheapest model. I ordered the most expensive iPad, the one that I wanted. The one that I had been waiting three years for—no compromise.

I loved the all possibilities within that iPad. Lots of storage, great camera, and the cellular aspect was brilliant, I was no longer tethered to WiFi. But it was a long and painful road to get that iPad. I had it inscribed on the back, In Dreams Begins Possibility—with a nod to WB Yeats.

A few years later, when the battery failed, I was devastated, but Apple replaced the iPad for $100. I was back in business. But by then, the iPad had become such an integral part of my work, I couldn’t imagine life without it. I was able to document and scan all my papers and memorabilia, including many of my poetry journals—which meant that I was finally able to flush out this blog, all those lean years began to fill in with blog entries. The iPad was an excellent archival tool, and helped me to create a literary timeline of my life’s work, such as it is. A retrospective. For that, I was grateful. I still used my headless MacBook Pro for OCR and formatting. But the transportability of the iPad was positively liberating.

I should’ve seen the writing on the wall. It wasn’t just Neil’s stinginess over money, it was a deep abiding stinginess of the soul. After Neil and I broke up in August, 2018, fittingly, that iPad was stolen, the following April 2019, while I was helping a friend who just had surgery, to the car. Some April Fool’s joke. We had a good run, that iPad and I. But karma fuck & damn the San Rafael Peet’s customer who took my iPad. I finally replaced it at the end of August with a 256 GB iPad Air 3—an expensive ouch that cost half what the first iPad cost. But friends chipped in to ease the burden. For that I am grateful. I am forging myself a new life because, well, In Dreams Begins Possibility.

Vineyard gulags

Vineyards are unsightly as compared to the natural Northern California landscape, and they’re a very thirsty monoculture, they tend to destroy all native species and habitats. Unfortunately vineyards are not without their destructive nature. Too many vineyard owners up and down the coast have bulldozed and razed ancient heritage oak forests into kindling in order to plant grapes—and only pay a small fine for their transgressions.

How many people know the opening screensaver,  that iconic green hill rising like a sun in Cotati that countless Windows users have gazed upon for decades is now a gulag of grapes? You can’t undo the damage that vineyards cause, and you can’t unsee it either.

Marin during the Depression

It’s a myth to assume that all of Marin was made of old European money, therefore immune to the effects of the Great Depression. My Irish grandmother, who was European but had no old or new money, acquired habits of extreme thrift, and was a master at fixing and repurposing things. She saved tinfoil, rubber bands, string, had rich junk drawers and junk piles. She made sheets and clothing from flour sacks and gunneysacks for her 8 children, she grew food in the garden. Canned food for the winter. Traded food with neighbors for milk, and eggs. Saved fat. All those industrious habits were forged during the depression and were passed onto the next two generations. The model is at hand.

PCH is Highway 1. It’s all a matter of perspective.

PCH is Highway 1—in SoCal it’s called Pacific Coast Highway. When they try and call Highway 1 PCH in NorCal, we tend to lose our minds.... it’s not Highway 101 but to confuse things, 101 joins forces with Highway 1 at Oxnard and Ventura to Santa Barbara, heads inland at Gaviota, while HIghway 1 veers toward Lompoc and goes inland towards Santa Maria—but doesn’t follow the coast until Arroyo Grands and Pismo Beach.

Highway 101 and Highway 1 share a stretch roadbed at Leggett where it becomes 101 all the way to Port Angeles, where it circles the Olympic Peninsula—the coastal side of the loop is sometimes referred to as Highway 1 too. And when you cross the Straits, it resurfaces as a stretch of Highway 1 from Victoria to Naniamo to Vancouver but just to be ridiculous, then Highway 1 goes inland to Calgary to the East Coast. I blame it on the Canadian beer.

Besides, once you get to Northern California Highway 1 is no longer called Pacific Coast Highway. Then there’s Baja to consider too. That too is Highway 1...I think I’ve traveled every stretch of it from Calgary west and south to Cabo. One all the way. It’s all a matter of perspective depending upon where you live, alliances to the northern or southern part of the state.

UNDER THE MADRONE, OLD OBSTACLES, MoSt poetry challenge #1 4 haiku

Many challenges
A year of indecision
Obstacles melted.

Under the madrone
Old car settles in, dreaming
Of the open road.

Settling into
A new life without rancor
Myriad choices.

New digs deepen roots
When the past becomes a dream
Old tree bears new fruit.

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center New Year’s challenge 1 haiku

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center New Year’s challenge.

Write a haiku for some goodness that has happened to you this year. If you find it difficult to choose just one, feel free to create a haiku series of goodnesses. Ready…steady… go…

Many challenges

A year of indecision

Obstacles melted.

Under the madrone
Old car settles in, dreaming
Of the open road.

Settling into
A new life without rancor
Myriad choices.

New digs deepen roots
When the past becomes a dream
Old tree bears new fruit.










NYPC 11 Prompts

Prompt #1: Greetings, Poets! Okay, here we go…For your first poem—and continuing Gillian’s first-poem tradition to ease us all into this—
Write a haiku for some goodnessthat has happened to you this year. Feel free to create a haiku series of goodnesses if it’s difficult to choose just one. Ready…steady… go…

Prompt #2: Consider times in our lives when we are at the table, or someone has said, Come to the table. Write a poem for these times, or about the many sorts of tables (dining, negotiating, or even Periodic) we come to —or leave. For inspiration, consider this poem by our current U. S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo: https://poets.org/poem/perhaps-world-ends-here

Prompt #3: Write a poem in response to this idea: The Graceful Stumble. This is a prompt from the contest portion of our MoSt 8th Annual Poetry Festival, which will be held on Saturday, February 1st, 2020. The deadline for submissions is Saturday, January 11th, 2020. For more information, go to our website:
https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/8th-annual-modesto-poetry-festival/

Prompt #4: Write a poem in response to one or some (or all!) of these quotations, and/or use them as an epigram in your poem, or form the title of your poem from part of the quotation:

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” (Douglas Adams)

“Out of every wandering in which people and places come and go in long successions, there is always one place remembered above the rest because the external or internal conditions were such that they produced happiness…One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.” (Willa Cather)

“Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.” (Natalie Goldberg)

“If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.” (Hazel Henderson)

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” (Albert Einstein)

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” (E. B. White)

“Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” (Groucho Marx)

Prompt #5: Write a poem in response to this idea: Handling Earth With Care. This is a prompt from the contest portion of our MoSt 8th Annual Poetry Festival, which will be held on Saturday, February 1st, 2020. The deadline for submissions is Saturday, January 11th, 2020. For more information, go to our website:
https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/8th-annual-modesto-poetry-festival/

Prompt #6: Try your hand at writing an ode (a poem of praise) or an elegy (a poem of loss) to a mentor. (See more detailed descriptions by the Academy of American Poets below.)
In The Odyssey, Mentor was a friend of Odysseus whom Odysseus placed in charge of his son Telemachus and of his palace when he went off to the Trojan War. The personal name Mentor has been adopted in English as a term meaning someone who imparts wisdom to and shares knowledge with a less experienced colleague. (Yes, this previous sentence has been paraphrased from Wikipedia.)
Consider who your mentors have been; write an ode or elegy to them and their commitment, energy, enthusiasm, and other characteristics. Or, to whom have you been a mentor? Who needsmentoring, and how, and why? See if you can write your poem embracing some of these elements.
https://poets.org/glossary/ode
https://poets.org/glossary/elegy
Prompt #7: Write a poem in response to this idea: Notre Dame. This is a prompt from the contest portion of our MoSt 8thAnnual Poetry Festival, which will be held on Saturday, February 1st, 2020. The deadline for submissions is Saturday, January 11th, 2020. For more information, go to our website:
https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/8th-annual-modesto-poetry-festival/

Prompt #8 (for December 22nd): Happy Winter Solstice! I guess you could call today’s prompt The Long and the Short of It, or Slow and Steady…
Write about a time when you had to do something slower than you’re used to because something “modern and efficient” broke down. OR write about doing something “the old-fashioned way” because you enjoy it. OR write about doing something carefully and meticulously because something important is at stake. OR combine all three elements…
For an example, read this poem by Maine poet Judy Punturo:

Cutting the Grass With Scissors


You do it
when there seems to be no other way,
when things have gone too far;

when the lawn mower balks
and even the weed whacker shies.
It’s slow, yes,

but surprisingly effective,
Grasp a handful, pull aside,
and shear, down near the roots,

and then you hold a sheaf like wheat
to harvest in a pile, or lay
like cushioned carpet on the path.

Sometimes spit bugs,
shaken from their frothy homes,
rest on your hand,

and then crawl on,
while copper beetles
scuttle for shade.

I like the intimacy
With a patch of ground,
The closeness and drawing in,

the sibilance,
the swish the grass makes
with the scissored snap of stems,

the way time changes,
stalls and disappears
with each slow slice.


Judy Punturo
Cutting the Grass with Scissors: Monhegan Poems

Prompt #9 (for December 23rd): Write a poem in response to this idea: Following a Thread. This is a prompt from the contest portion of our MoSt 8th Annual Poetry Festival, which will be held on Saturday, February 1st, 2020. The deadline for submissions is Saturday, January 11th, 2020. If you’ve not yet registered for the Festival, please check out the information on our website:
https://www.mostpoetry.org/event/8th-annual-modesto-poetry-festival/
This will be a wonderful day of poetry!
Ready…Steady…Go!

Prompt #10 (for December 24th): Write a poem about the photograph below—which I snagged from some random Facebook post a year or so ago and don’t know how to give credit. Since this is a pretty famous Eve, try incorporating some of what you see into a “Just before this…”/”Right now…”/”And then…” narrative. Consider having your title serve as your first or last line—or merely number it as if this poem were one in a series. Ready? Steady… Go~~~

Prompt #11 (for December 25th): There are a lot of holidays to celebrate in December! According to nationalday.com, there are several designated holidays between the 21st(Winter Solstice) and the 27th (National Fruitcake Day), including Chanukah, National Cookie Exchange Day, National Short Person Day, Festivus (!), Christmas, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, National Candy Cane Day, and National Thank You Note Day. Whether you celebrate one, some, or all of these days, or have a favorite day of your own set aside for celebration or commemoration, how do you choose to acknowledge it? What sensations (sights, sounds, smells, etc.), objects, traditions, memories, and people come to mind? Write a poem no longer than 25 lines that explores these possibilities. For an extra challenge, write a poem about a holiday that doesn’t yet exist, but should. Ready…Steady…Go~~~
Prompt #11 (for December 25th): There are a lot of holidays to celebrate in December! According to nationalday.com, there are several designated holidays between the 21st(Winter Solstice) and the 27th (National Fruitcake Day), including Chanukah, National Cookie Exchange Day, National Short Person Day, Festivus (!), Christmas, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, National Candy Cane Day, and National Thank You Note Day. Whether you celebrate one, some, or all of these days, or have a favorite day of your own set aside for celebration or commemoration, how do you choose to acknowledge it? What sensations (sights, sounds, smells, etc.), objects, traditions, memories, and people come to mind? Write a poem no longer than 25 lines that explores these possibilities. For an extra challenge, write a poem about a holiday that doesn’t yet exist, but should. Ready…Steady…Go~~~

A note on Medieval turnspit dogs

A dog at work inside a wheel near the ceiling;
Remarks on a Tour to North and South Wales (1800). —Wiki

An administrator of Facebook’s British Medieval History group—got his knickers in a twist, and got more than a little heavy-handed with me, he blocked me, then threw me in Facebook jail, after deleting all my posts, because I posted a comment on Vera Moraes’ query about medieval pets. The reason cited was because my mere mentioning of turnspit dogs, was outside of the BMH timeframe, cutoff date is 1485— but here’s the thing, they probably were used during the Middle Ages.

The first ever book on the history of native canines in the British isles, was published in 1565, well out of the medieval timeframe, and was translated from the Latin in 1570. How long it took to research and write the book was not recorded, but one could surmise it was the work of a lifetime, or decades in the making. If so, then it was compiled close to the end of the Medieval era. 

The publication date of said dog book doesn’t mean that turnspit dogs were only used from 1570 onward. The book’s subject, native dogs of Britain, would’ve been quite specialized. Printed books were still a novelty item of the wealthy classes, who could afford them. And a book on native dogs of Britain, even more specialized. Question is, WHY was the book compiled?

Just like the Middle English manuscripts, Forme of Cury, and To the King's Taste, books were published long after the original recipes had been invented—because the information was in danger of being forever lost. I suspect an influx of foreign (French) dogs were flooding the market, to the point where British breeds were in danger of being lost. Imported spaniels (Spanish dogs) were mentioned as well.

The book mentions turnspit dogs among other types of dogs. But I’d bet a roast beef dinner that turnspit dogs were used much earlier. People weren’t dumb. If someone could design a grist mill (ca. 800 BC), using a stream, a windmill, or horse/ox/donkey/goat-drawn wheel or thresher, or build a spinning wheel, a standard household item ubiquitous across Europe in the 1300s (earliest drawing of one 1035 AD), they could easily envision a dog in a turnspit cage. The model was at hand. In fact, when I saw engravings of mechanical turnspits, I thought they were spinning wheels stored on the walls.

Linnaeus dubbed the turnspit dog its own breed, Canis vertigus. But by the 18th c., “The breed was lost, since it was considered to be such a lowly and common dog that no record was effectively kept of it. Some sources consider the turnspit dog a kind of Glen of Imaal Terrier, while others make it a relative of the Welsh Corgi.” —Wiki

My Berkeley Medieval Studies professor, Dr. Dan Melia, astutely pointed out that early books were written to preserve what was in danger of being lost. Not just for piety or pleasure. This comment was in reference to a segue to the Irish epics—they weren’t invented in the Middle Ages, they were transcribed during that time because the stories were in danger of being lost due to societal upheaval—namely the arrival of the Vikings. Different concept. They weren’t written in a void but they certainly codified what came before.

Dog were owned by all classes, not just the wealthy. Anyone who had a farm had dogs to work hogs, sheep, cattle. And ratters were very important to the miller! Also, dogs were employed as draft/draught animals, how we get the term dogcart. The ornate grill structure used to lay and corral the burning logs were called firedogs. And the iron turnspit architecture was referred to as dogs.

Both the Irish youth-hero Fionn, and his Arthurian Welsh counterpart, Gwion/Taliesin, were left in charge of turning the salmon of wisdom on a spit.

The fisherman took a salmon of great size and beauty, which they placed at the fire to broil, leaving it in charge of Fionn, who was to take care that it did not burn, on pain of losing his head. ...Sparks flew from the fire, which raised a blister on the fish. —Taliesin, Or, The Bards and Druids of Britain: A Translation D.H Nash, 1858

Fionn applied his thumb to the scorched part of the fish, then stuck his thumb in his mouth, and was “gifted with prophecy and foreknowledge.” A similar tale follows in the story of Gwion/Taliesin. The name Gwion is a Welsh cognate of Fionn. In the Norse Saga of Sigurd, Sigurd was in charge of roasting the dragon’s heart. The boy heroes all disingenuously gain arcane knowledge and the gift of forethought. Sigurd gained knowledge of the language of the birds.

These medieval fragments merely serve to illustrate that turnspit were indeed used and young boys were employed for the mundane task. Knowing how young boys were ingeniously quick to shirk their chores, it’s a short leap of faith from turnspit boy to turnspete dog.

Warbling ravens

Few people know that ravens warble serenades to their mates and loved ones. A proper raven never caws, he croaks, and clicks, and if you croak back to him, you might have a conversation. There’s a place on Inverness Ridge with its resident ravens, where we’ve been huckleberrying for decades. Ravens are very territorial, and are long-lived, up to 15 years, not like crows who live only 7 years. We figure we’ve met at least that many generations of ravens on the ridge. They seem to pass that knowledge onto their offspring. When we first arrive, they raise the alarm. The same cry they make whenever the redtail hawk circles overhead. We croak reassuringly to them to announce our presence, they settle down, and quit making their danger-danger-danger alarm call, and carry on with their sweet warbling in the fog-enshrouded pine trees.

Friday the 13th

On Friday the 13th, I nearly ran over a beer-cooler-sized robot sporting an antenna and a triangular orange diving flag, in a crosswalk near UC Berkeley. Not expecting an unaccompanied robot crossing the street, I very nearly flattened it—I’m sure some people would like to do just that.  I guess Cal’s robots are not like chickens randomly crossing the street—otherwise they’d be techno roadkill. I thought of the story of the eagle Repeatedly taking down that drone trespassing in his sky. Apparently one man was so enraged, he kidnapped a kiwibot, threw it in the back of his trunk, where it thrashed and beeped and called home—until the police located it via GPS. And now the man is up on charges of grand larceny, they’re pricy little bastards. I thought, if I had flattened that bot in the crosswalk, how would the insurance work? Do robots have the same rights as humans if they’re in a crosswalk?

Hot flash

Once I fondled a festive potted ornamental Thai pepper-plant hidden amid the pointsettias. Not only did I touch both eyelids, but I rubbed my upper lip, then stuck a finger up my nose—all this before I’d left the checkout line at the grocery store. A true sob story. I looked like a red raccoon. A gift that kept right on giving, I might add, as I didn’t know how to neutralize the volatile oils. Duly filed under Stupid things I’ve done in public....

Mining joy

When I’m feeling down, I mine joy, find gratitude, fund laughter & raucously cackle like no one is listening—to snort until I nearly wet myself, is an added bonus. That’s how I roll. You got a problem wit dat?