National Poem Writing Month

If November is National Novel Writing Month, then cruel April is National Poem Writing Month. 30 Days, 30 Poems.

Silly Poem

A silly poem for a silly kitten

who madly grabs the carpet

and throunces the corner

and thumps it within an inch of its life

until it begs for mercy

but the kitten has lost interest

and is peering at me

with that crazed look in his eye

and he races off to the kitchen

colliding with the cabinet

where the catfood hides.

He thwacks the door a few times

the rubberband taut between the knobs

holds and twangs like a Jewsharp

but the kitten gallops off again,

tail arched like an Arabian horse,

to attack poor old Nellie the cat,

caught napping, she hisses

and swats him down into place

but he's undaunted

and she enters into the fray

batting a piece of paper like a pingpong ball,

she's playing for both teams,

she scores a goal at both ends of the hall,

she pirouettes while he watches on

with a practiced bored expression

on his little kitten face. He yawns,

and curls up on my laptop for a nap.

Write a silly poem: http://bit.ly/deimZ9

Crawdaddies

Why does everyone call crawdads "crayfish" when  they're clearly not a fish at all? We don't call  their pinche cousins lobsters & langistinos—lobsterfish. At least a few crawdads are actually dads. Otherwise there’d be none at all. In Australia they call freshwater crawdaddies (crayfish) "Yabbies" or "Koonac". Mudbugs, ditch bugs. Whatever you call 'em.

My brother Guy used to catch crawdads in Arroyo/Barranca Creek and cook them in a tiny pot until they turned red. Tasted like lobster. Do they still have that big annual Delta crawdad feed in Locke? Went once with my cousins Dave & Sinead. They covered the table with newspaper and dumped platterfulls of 'daddies on the table.

I preferred the crawdads from our clear creeks—no muddy aftertaste. ‘Course the beer takes care of that. How to eat crawdads? Pinch the tails and suck they heads, as they say. Not much meat, but, sweet with butter & lemon. We used to hang red rubber bands from string and the crawdads would latch onto them and we'd slowly ease them out of the water, with them hanging onto their treat. The trick was to have a net ready to catch them as they dropped off. We never had a net, and I was too impatient to lull them to shore, but I still tried to lob them to the bank. God, they could pinch!

I found this: The name "crayfish" does not come from the word "fish", but from the Old French, escrevisse (Modern French écrevisse) meaning "crevice" referring to the habitat of the animal. The word has been modified to "crayfish" by association with "fish". The American variant "crawfish" is similarly derived. (This derivation is an example of folk etymology.)

Aha! It's a Malaprop, or a Mondegreen: escrevisse = crayfish. They have slain the Earl of Morey and laid him on the green (Lady Mondegreen). Mrs. Malaprop bungled aphorisms. Songs take a big hit too.  José can you see, by the dawn's early light. Me, a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy (mea culpea). 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy.  In a Godda davida!

Don't forget the starfish.  Neither fish, nor star.

Woodpussie

My uncle once rescued an old sailboat, a Woodpussie,

from the bottom of Tiburon Harbor and parked it on our hillside.

It sank into the dirt, the only tide it ever saw was a steady sea of grass.

One spring I planted bulbs in large cans, and arranged them on the deck,

the boat was a riot of color, but watering them was my undoing.

The gophers smelled food and chewed thru the bottom of the boat,

climbed up the deck and into the pots just to get to them.

I WAS A KINDERGARTEN DROPOUT

When I was four-going-on-five,

on my way to kindergarten,

a gophersnake stretched itself across the fireroad

and I was too terrified to step over it.

I managed to step over the snake once

but when it happened again,

the snake stretching out his long green coolness across the road,

I dropped out of kindergarten.

I simply wouldn't go. My grandmother relented,

my tantrums verged on archetypal hysteria,

and so I was a kindergarten drop out.

It was a mile to the highway to catch the bus—

and I was a very young kindergartner

so I often got lost along the way.

My grandmother did not walk me to the bus stop.

She figured I'd manage on my own.

But it was a terribly long way,

an infinite ribbon of road with myriad country distractions.

I remember catching the big yellow bus once.

A sea of hostile faces and an irate bus driver

who didn't like to wait. That sealed my fate.

3/25/2008

Gophersnakes (or why I was a kindergarten drop-out.)

When  I was four, a gophersnake would stretch itself all the way across Arroyo Road (it was still a fire road in those days) and I was terrified to step over it. I did manage to muster up enough bravery once—but when it happened again, I dropped out of kindergarten. I simply wouldn't go. My grandmother relented, and so I was a kindergarten drop out. It was a mile to SF Drake to catch the bus—and I was a very young kindergartner (November birthday) so I often got lost along the way. The road was long, so many distractions.  I remember catching the bus once. A sea of hostile faces and an irate bus driver.

OAKLAND TURF WARS

I heard the keen of a hawk overhead,
all the birds ducked for cover,
and now the bluejay's jabberin' up a storm,
stealing the finches’ food and dive-bombing
the poor cat—just because he can.

Notes on Zana's Scarecrow Photo

                       —from a photo by Zana Darrow

The scarecrow wants to escape to the islands,

but he's landlocked in the backwoods of Wisconsin.

He's a hunter, a redneck, or a logger,

wearing an aloha lei over his plaid shirt.

His belt buckle is a flattened beer can

of finest aluminum alloy.

He's into supersizing, he eats a lot

of Wonderbread washed down with beer.

Smokes a little Maui-wowie when he can get it.

He's a bit shady. His other truck is a truck.

He's either unemployed,

the welfare checks have run out,

or else he's a writer

(the full beard that's seen no razor in years)

or else he's my first ex-boyfriend

(Sweet Old Bob) gone retro-native, the shit.

Life is shitty, everybody dumps on him

so he takes a dump in the woods

to get back to nature, he says.

Or maybe a tornado whirled his house away

while he was sitting on the pot.

Or he's waiting for hunting season

and the deer to come to him…

But at the crossroads on the edge of town,

the topless bars are hopping.

He reckons he'll have to sit this one out.

Celebrating Health Care Reform on Facebook

It's only 4:20 (alors!) but I'm having a pint o' chardonnay w/ my egg salad samwich to celebrate the health care bill passing. We've finally entered into the 20th century—better a century late, than never.

Here's to Mother Jones & all the Irish American women suffragettes who fought for social reform—from founding of labor unions to free public education to birth control to to medical care. Sláinte agaibh! Think I'll have ice cream for dinner. What wine to pair with it? Decisions, decisions.

Katelin writes that I should poach pears in a wine and spice mix (vanilla, cloves, cinnamon, apple juice - whatever is in the cupboard at the time) when done, to make a reduction with the leftovers, absolute heaven with vanilla ice cream.

Oooh, I have a bottle of 2 Buck Chuck Cabernet & some fat pears from Costco, Neil's bringing the French Vanilla ice cream from TJs. It's a plan. I ask Katelin, should I remove the labels from the pears? Katelin tells me: peel those babies, please!

So the ice cream perched on the poached pear halves looks a bit like the Sydney Opera house, do I need a passport/visa to Oz in order to eat this just dessert?

Note to self: next time don't toss in the whole Meyer lemon, just the zest.

Katelin asks; How much chardonnay, again? You may be Irish, but you cook like a Frenchwoman.

I reply, I only drink what's in the neck. Well you know Brittany is Celtic, after all...

Katelin: Cherchez la femme. Takes one to know one. Bon appetit!

French vanilla ice cream does taste much better with wine. Perhaps a wine float for dessert? Does this count as drunk posting while flacebrooking?

Katelin replies: what the hell are you going to float it on, woman? I have always heard the Irish had high tolerance. I have have a lot of Scot, so canna say

Zana drops in and comments: Did you two make it home ok?

Hhaha! It all started out wrong like a dog eating catfood— yesterday morning when another friend suggested Jack Daniels & pickle juice for brekkie as my friend Alexander was out of coffee... I never quite recovered my proper senses after that imagined assault.

That, and with Zana's beer can decorated scarecrow sitting at the edge of the woods on the loo, my mind was utterly deja-voodooed & warped. I did, however, have a glass of whine at 4:20pm, I did make pears poached in you-know-what—but truth be known, I'm such a pantywaist lightweight, I never could drink much. Not even in high school on a dare and not even Irish whiskey.

I drank too much vodka once with Sue Barry & Sue Williams out at Taylor Park circa 1967 and had a 3-day hangover, that was the end of my drinking career. It was years before I could even look at orange juice. Bless the gallant young stranger who held me upright as I puked in the bushes. But yesterday was such a fun thread, we were all on a roll, I didn't want to disrupt it. I'm still tittering. This is good.

Zana replies: I hear you. I had to give up lemon cream rinse in my hair back in the 70's after a long round of tequila. I also found out my newly aquired spanish words shouldn't be repeated.

Lin Marie chimes in: Hilarious! I am making a toast to you all! Clink!

Health Care bill passes

To celebrate the Health Care bill passing, I made TJs instant pudding (blancmange) and spiked it wih cocoa and Bailey's Irish Cream & I added a little cream fraiche. Five minutes before the bill passed, Obama tweeted: Yes we can. Yes we did. Indeed. I loved Nancy Pelosi's line "Being a woman will no longer be a pre-existing medical condition." Ain’t dat da truth. Never in my lifetime did I imagine such a thing happening. Giddy with excitement. Here's to you, Teddy Kennedy, for making it so.

From a Facebook post

BarackObama Tonight’s vote is not a victory for any one party – it is a victory for the American people. Tonight, we answered the call of history. House Passes Sweeping Health Care Overhaul Bill - ABC News

Finding new rellies on facebook

The Bantry & Manchester Walshes have found us in Facebook—it's about time, cousins! Hello all. I'm Jennie (Jane) Walsh Reilly's grandaughter. Please go to Geni and add your families.

I sent you Teresa Armstrong's link, there are 4 more links on my page. I'm waiting for Alan. Is Noel on FB? Go to my page to see the links.

BIG HINT: if last name is Walsh (or Armstrong), we're related. Grainne is Teresa's daughter—I had to look it up on Geni. These are all Paddy & Mary's kids (Bantry & Manchester.

Wasn't someone in Cardiff? Sinead? & Birmingham?).

Don't know about Frank & Bridie's kids (Tralee). Haven't had contact since the 70s.

The Walshes are a Nation Once Again—we're at 700 people on Geni & still growing!

And we're not done connecting with all the Nevada Walshes yet. Bea sent a story about Mike Malloy the Nevada Co DA. Look him up. Also Steve Walsh & family just joined. At this point-even a road map isn't helping tho Bea explained how we're related. Either a 2nd cousin or a 2nd cousin once removed. Not sure where he lives. Is he on FB? Maybe we need to start a Group page for all of us (the We're Related app isn't working).

Mike Malloy is in Reno, Nevada...he's my 2nd cousin; his father Emmett was Nellie Walsh Malloy's youngest.  Nellie was Old Pat's oldest child.  I've never met him.

So when's the next WALSH REUNION? Who's putting it on? Where? Who can put up 2-300 people at once?

We just need a flophouse large enough! I wonder if Jim Chanpie would let us make an encampment at Home Ranch? We all keep pestering him over they years. The Walshes  (all 700 of us) are his most frequent visitors.

L'il RIX

Spent the day jumpstarting & detailing L'il Rix, my retired '87 Honda SI since Neil's car was stolen and is in the shop—it's still backless & dashless—& he keeps borrowing my car, leaving me housebound. And you know how I hate housework. I forgot what a gas L'il RIX is to drive. Pedal to the metal—it's as fast as my Three Bars mare at the quarter mile. Cheetahs & race horses, move over, L'il RIX is back in town.

It was all those fast horses I rode as a kid... Nuthin' quite like riding the world's fastest horse at the quarter mile—bareback. It was like riding a rolling barrel. The old railroad bed below Shafters that led int Samuel P Taylor Park had a good straightaway.

L'il RIX has a powerful thirst upon himself—he needs a little brake fluid. Should I tell Neil (who's driving it)? Or surprise him?

Lent

I've given up housekeeping for lent.

Oh, wait, that was last year, or was it last decade?

It was a tough decision, but someone had to do it.

I thought about giving up tea, chocolate and chardonnay

but if I gave up the tea, then I'd have to kill everybody.

Not a pretty sight w/o my litre of morning tea.

As for housekeeping, I've learned to develop aversion eyes.

HOME ALONE & CARLESS

Uh-oh, I'm home alone, and carless, 

with a bag of old Halloween chocolate 

beseeching me to... 

Um, that chocolate is in the past tense.
Oh look, some Bailey's Irish Cream 

hidden in the back of the fridge....

added 3/17, from FB

Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams: Parrots, the universe and everything TEDtalks "Best of the Web." About this talk "Blind river dolphins, reclusive lemurs, a parrot as fearless as it is lovelorn ... Douglas Adams' close encounters with these rare and unusual animals reveal that evolution, ever ingenious, can be fickle too— in a University of California talk that sparkles with his trademark satiric wit."

I miss Douglas Adams. I once wrote Douglas Adams a zany letter after finishing the Hitchhiker series, and he wrote right back! Will have to haul it out someday. I always liked his story about the computer that calculated that the answer to the question, "What is the meaning of life?" The answer was always "42".

Twig Doug nattering on about close encounters of the lemurian kind. An Arthur-Dentianish eye view of the eye-eye and its even rarer cousin, the lemur with Marty Feldman eyes and the evolution of his long bird (or twig) finger.

Followed by a man-eating Komodo dragon chaser with bad breath.

The flightless parrot, the kakapoo is a bird that's forgotten that he's forgotten how to fly...We won't even mention the kakapoo's elaborate, if ineffectual, 100-night basso profundo mating rituals...

Maureen Hurley reads To My Poetry Students on YouTube

 

Maureen Hurley reads To My Poetry Students

Uploaded on Jun 25, 2010

Maureen Hurley reads
"To My Poetry Students"
 Sacramento Poetry Center

need to check date. Probably was during POL March?  I can't figure out how to embed the YouTube video on the page, so a still and a link will have to suffice.

 

CHERRY BLOSSOM STORM

CHERRY BLOSSOM STORM


I drove the long way back home
to take in the cherryplum blossoms
lining Old River Road but a hailstorm
pelted the smithereens out of the trees.
Petals—like a carnage of plucked feathers.
Mt. St. Helena wore a lenticular cloud frock,
& as the unreasonable clouds snowed & hailed,
they shimmied like fringes of go-go girl dresses,
& flocks of rainbows spangled the brooding sky.


3/11/2010

Squid mimicing the stars

Tiny Hawaiian bobtail squid uses bioluminescent bacteria to mimic the stars, thus rendering them invisible to their predators at night. Gotta be a poem in that! Don't forget to take a break during the Oscar commercials & go outside: the space shuttle will be crossing Orion's belt tonight.

Dead Man's Curve

I once had to draw a before & after drawing for the old quarry on Hwy 116. First drawing was with a hitchhiker. Second drawing with a hitchhiker's skeleton! Clients loved it.  The quarry pretty much wound up how I projected it. Those backroads were my home roads—we knew every twist & bend of the roads and what the curve would hold—acceleration-wise. 

One time, one of my steering column bolts broke going down to Muir Woods. The first bolt cracked on White's Hill. Only one bolt between me & God. Had to back up a lot to make it back around the curves with such a wide swishy steering range! The real Dead Man's Curve is in Lagunitas, past the church, before Kenneth Rexroth's old place. A good thing I didn't attempt it.

Day 2 Migraine

I'm irritated by the fact that day 2 of migraine is like day one of a hangover but no alcohol was harmed or trendily oxygenated in the process. What is it about migraines that makes me a friggin' synaesthete? A spoon on china has an additional texture—like two pieces of silk velvet rubbed into each other, or a dog unexpectedly licking my lips.

I loved that book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Imagine trying to tell your mother that her very voice was making your migraine and nausea worse. "Is there anything I could do?" Love the line about how headaches went away after the divorce. Not tonight, dear, I have a headache… I do have TMJ. Maybe that's the root cause.


One doctor gave me belladonna and I made the mistake of driving while under the influence—talk about Alice falling down the rabbit hole! Guerneville Road was like a chute with black walls! I decided the migraine was easier to live with than the medication!

  

Poetry's Mom

Yesterday at Alexander Valley School, for a Day 1 CPITS residency, a kindergartner came up and asked if I was somebody's mom. W/o thinking I said, yes, I'm Poetry's mom—& for them, so I am.

3/4 Rainy day + Oakland kids + substitute teacher burst my euphoric bubble.

I awoke to the image of white horses standing in the rain

I awoke this morning to the image of white horses standing in the rain, while thinking of Robert Sund's The Hides of White Horses Shedding Rain, part of his Ish River poems collection (Copper Canyon Press). He was an amazing reader—could weave a spell in no time flat. A calligrapher and painter as well. We had much in common. I wish I had bought that book, when I met him at Port Townsend in 1981, but I had no money at the time.

...The great white horse 
Stands under the warm rain
Like a shining cathedral.

—Adrian Mitchel, from Understanding the Rain

...and again falls
this quiet,
persistent rain.

—Robert Creeley, from The Rain

3
Along the Columbia,
     three more hours and I'm home.
But first
I close the car door
and walk in a field of mountain grass.

I lie down, drink clear
water, dream of old rituals
and what it feels to be pure of heart.

When I get back home to the Ish River country,
I'll open the barn door
and see the hides of white horses shedding rain.

—Robert Sund, from Night Along the Columbia, Day in Blewitt Pass, Going Home

I had a white horse for a while—a stray from Forest Farm Camp (Linda Gregg's home) who wandered from winter pastures to our hill. Poor old Foos hated the rain—she turned dingy creamy, rain falling from her long lashes and that pale summer blue lake of her eyes, entreating me to make it stop.

I had to wait that long, seven years, just to find Sund's poem on the internet.

Major 7.0 quake, offshore Ryukyu Islands, Japan. Wonder if this was the source of my horse dream?

added & revised 2/2017

 Anacortes poet Robert Sund's 2001 obit

Kenneth Rexroth's columns (1960-67) for the SF Examiner posted

Poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote some 700 columns (1960-67) for SF Examiner; Ken Knabb will post them 50 yrs after original pub date at the Bureau of Public Secrets.

Says Knabb: "Although Rexroth was by that time a well-known figure in the Bay Area, he was known primarily as a political and cultural radical, and even (somewhat misleadingly) as "the godfather of the Beat Generation."

But he was willing to work for the Examiner as long as they gave him complete freedom to write whatever he wanted. They did so until June 1967, when they fired him after he wrote a particularly scathing article about the American police."

Columns from the San Francisco Examiner (1960-1967) and San Francisco Magazine (1968-1975)

Kenneth Rexroths San Francisco Journalism (1960-1975).

bopsecrets.org

 

 http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/sfe

More Kenneth Rexroth columns posted here:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/sf

Rexroth's San Francisco

 

Sam Hamill Rexroth, on being called Grandaddy of the Beats: "An entomologist is not a bug." Robert Duncan on KR's role in the San Francisco Renaissance: "He was our chief librarian."

 

Mo Hurley Ha! My grandfather used to hike with Kenneth up Devi's Gulch. My grandmother religiously saved all his columns; she also sat next to Marie Rexroth at St. Cecelia's church in Lagunitas for decades! I used to ride by their cabin on horseback—REXROTH painted in black on a long wooden board resting in the redwood & oak duff. Funny reading about Kenneth's girls, knowing that John McBride would later marry one—he used to spend time with his aunt & uncle who lived in Nicasio (or had a summer home) & we knew them as well. I met Kenneth at Sonoma State—I'd organized a reading for him there but he was a right cranky old codger with everyone religiously kowtowing before him...he was seemingly bored with living.

 

Sam Hamill Far from it. Kenneth was fed up the capitalist criminal class and had many health problems in his old age. Around young progressives and radicals he was a-glow. Next fall or spring U of Michigan will publish Rachelle Lerner's absolutely masterful book on KR, a thoroughly researched critical appreciation.

 

Mo Hurley It was right before he died—in 81, I think; and he wasn't in good health...his wife was ? jean?

 

Sam Hamill Carol Tinker.

 

Mo Hurley Right!

 

 

from a facebook post

Home from the Scottish Games at the Queen Mary

Home again, jiggity-jig—from the Scottish Games at the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

As I taught kids silk painting in the parking lot, someone stole one of my display scarves—part of an air earth fire water mural quartet that SF Tenderloin teachers painted with me ages ago. Yes, the scarf was tied down—well it WAS a butterfly! The irritating thing is, I'd just taught her how to paint on silk. Classic case of misdirection. Thing is, because they're done by students—no one thinks to steal them. I had it well anchored with clothes pins and it was also tied down, and it was there the entire day (despite the wind)—until the two girls came back...

The Queen Mary was cramped but so very art deco in rose & gray appointements. Men of Worth, a great duo, with Donald McDonald played in the Queen's Ballroom Friday night; someone requested one of my fave songs: Ralph McTell's Streets of London. Kenneth McKennen from the Isle of Skye... Portree—recorded Neil O'Neill at a set for Gaelic Radio—on an iPod! Neil sang in English but I could've sung in Irish—had he known! Note all the double-barrel names! LOL!

Meanwhile, across the Long Beach channel, TEDTalks were in an uproar. Keynote Sarah Silverman got all potty-mouthed & then stuck their nose in the goo. If TedTalks wanted—er—scuttlebutt, they should've hired The Big Yin as keynote.Billy Connolly may be crrrude, rrrude but he's also hilariously funny!

Speaking of crappers, Queen Mary, built on the Clydebank in 1930, has John Shanks in every stateroom. Neil was over the moon—more like mooning all the loos all made in his native Johnstone. He gleefully kept flushing the toilet like a mad dog—you had to step on a winch that read John Shanks on the porcelain knob. Mr. Shanks' fixtures are a fixture.

The hot and cold knobs say Hot Salt and Cold Salt. Imagine washing up in salt water. Not such a luxury after all.

added 2/17 

Two Lucille Clifton poems

Two of my favorite Lucille Clifton poems—i sat at her feet (well on the edge of the stage—with Maya Angelou for National Poetry Week) at she read them, I must dig up the photos. RIP Lucille!

“homage to my hips,”

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

“wishes for sons”

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.
i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

 

 

Queen Mary Scottish Games

We were featured at the 17th annual Queen Mary Scottish Games in Long Beach last weekend—our first time both performing and participating. It was a pleasant shock to run into so many old acquaintances there—including someone who read this blog—other than the spambots. They have turned me off to the point where I thought about deleting the entire blog just to get rid of them. They're worse than whale lice.

Now, I am under the profound illusion that there are 11 people in the world who are remotely aware that I even post a blog. But those 11 people don't actually read the blog— they're all those cute little postage stamp icons on the right column below the archives. Spambots don't count as they clearly don't have an aesthetic bone in their cyberbodies—though they are rather inventive at spelling/punctuation variations of Viagra and penis. Someday I'll make a list.

So imagine my surprise when one festival goer who is a fan of Neil O"Neill, Celtic Troubadour, said he'd actually been reading my blog. He showered me with compliments. Words like "talent," and "wisdom" were bandied about. My mouth gathered a profundity of flies (apparently Sarah Silverman had been seriously smutting down across the channel at the TEDTalks—a few disgruntled TED goers jumped ship—er conference hall—who came over to slum on the Queen Mary and maybe to look up men's kilts. You know those little cosmetic mirrors glued to the tops of their shoes?)

Anyway, all this to say that I've turned the comments section back on beneath most of the blog posts that I had previously blocked due to the literary spambots who write me lovenotes in such strange broken English. I found a new section that allows me to post a captcha and I no longer allow Anonymous posts—hopefully that will keep the thundering herds of spambots at bay. Hopefully. And with that, I might actually return to the blog arena again.

What my sole soul reader did say is that my blog was hard to follow in that there is no apparent order. That comes from my many writing hats. Maybe I should consider splitting the blog into several sections, or create different blogs. but it's hard enough just to keep one blog alive.

Should I pull all the poetry & post it in one blog? Post all the old newspaper articles in another blog and then create a separate Marin memoir blog? Problem is, the categories are all so fluid and they do inform who I am. I have never been good at separating my art genres. Is there a way to also thematically arrange the posts—other than by post date? Moving them means I lose the comments, BTW, and I do deem any genuine comments more precious than gold and Viagra. Any suggestions?

Sorcha Fragment

On a far distant isand on the other edge of the known world, a girl lay on a bright pile of mown hay, thinking of the tale the visiting seanchaí had told them around the hearth the night before. The sun drowsed her into that limnal state between waking and sleeping. The wind was like loose silk on her skin. She imagined it whispering—sometimes she could almost understand what it was saying. Something about Sorcha. A kingdom of light. Was it the wild geese flying overhead in a vee-formation that trapped her daydream in their net of air?

Blogger Spambots

For what it's worth, the spambots are onto my new posts like flies on shit. To wit, this fragment of an unfinished post was spammed in less than 12 hours after posting. So sorry that you cannot post a comment in most places at this point—I keep closing the loopholes as they sniff the comments out. No way to turn them all off—only one by one. That's about 300 posts. I found a new setting that wasn't in my Blogger settings before that allows me to put a captcha puzzle in the comments page. I also no longer allow "Anonymous" posts. as that was a real culprit. Someone please post a comment so I can see if it works!

Queen Mary Scottish Festival in Long Beach

Yo my LA Peeps: I will be teaching kids silkpainting and spinning Celtic tales at the Queen Mary Scottish Festival in Long Beach on 2/13 & 14; and Neil O'Neill will be headlining! We get to sleep on the ship too!

I will be sad to miss my annual Sonoma State Art from the Heart opening and art auction on Feb 13. My NorCAL Peeps: go forth and buy my silk painting for a lot of money—it supports the SSU Art Gallery. Tell Carla Stone NON & Mo sentcha!


February 6


Other news: My Sonoma State University classmate Doug Powell wins $100,000 Tufts Poetry Award for "Chronic." Who says poetry doesn't pay? Last time I saw Doug was at a SFSU reading in 2003ish.

water puppies

When we were kids we used to find giant water puppies in a tributary of Arroyo Creek in Lagunitas. They were huge, the size of large cats. Our water puppies on the slopes of Mt. Barnabe came in varying shades of brown and russet. We called them moving poops (we were very young). They were quite scary as we'd never seen anything like them before—and we thought we knew the woods and creeks like the back of our hands.

Unfortunately, the lone boy among us, Eric, stoned some of them them to death. They couldn't move very fast on land, I always felt so bad about that incident—as they were quite rare in West Marin!

Wiki link has a photo of a rather cute one. Ours were fiercely ugly. Now I get why they're called water puppies/dogs. They must've barked at us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_giant_salamander

Abetter Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Giant_Salamander

But ours were much stouter (hence the poopy name) —these salamanders are more svelte. Like Twiggy!

February 3, 2010

Close encounters with Japan's 'living fossil'
 

Out of the Blue (poem)

If you're looking for British poet unlaureate Simon Armitage's 9/11 poem, "Out of the Blue”, click here. This ain't it—but thanks for stopping by, maybe set yourself a spell and say hi?

Today, as I despaired, out of the blue
a disembodied voice shrieked from the void: 
Write your poetry. What can I say? Admit or deny
that I'm preoccupied trying to conjure up cash,
trying to sell poetry to schools that have no money—
even to match the imperatives of a poetry grant,
or that I'm trying to switch my left brain on
and it just won't go because winter malaise
has addled what's left my right brain as well?
That I am in a drought of my own keeping
or that I am saddened by the sorry state of affairs
in the schools, in the state, the country, in the world,
wondering if I'm going to have to take on menial labor
in order to survive & feeling rather desperate in general
as if suffering were good for art—or a way out.
Does it really boil down to a matter of faith?
Is it as easy as that—when no metaphors will come
and land unbidden on your shoulder
and whisper sweet nothings in your ear.
I want to say: I believe, I believe
though the darkness descends down to my toes
& my fingers stain the keyboard with invisible ink
& anachronisms abound in this technological age
but I'm too tired to wrestle with them
or bitch-slap them into a panacea for this century.

A note to Andrei Codrescu on Life of Crime

I sent Andrei Codrescu a jpg of the just released Life of Crime.
Andrei,
Have you seen the book yet? At long last....

Maureen

He said, It' a wonderful book! What scurrilous characters! What grand times! Fine pics, too, made me nostalgic (a bit). Oh, Ron, we love you! We were such boys! And now they write books about us we didn't even preorder! I'm enjoying Andrew Epstein's BEAUTIFUL ENEMIES -- I met him in Florida, read the intro on the plane. Terrific.

O yes, when you were such boys! I grew up on some of those tales—er—should I say tails? Marianne Ware's young daughter Laurie (now my landlady!) couldn't get your name right, and called you Andrei Undressyou which had something to do with you ravaging some young willowy sweet young thang (a poet-ess, no less?) over the top of of the McPhail's propane tank....OMG, I miss those days!

He said: A propane tank? Boy, were we limber!

I continued: Somebody on Facebook found my name—and wanted to know if I was the one doing standup at West of the Laguna, Sebastopol ca 1980. Er, I thought it was poetry (sigh). But then Alastair Johnston says he treats all his poetry readings like standup comedy. There's comedy in that.

Worth it all just to see Ron Silliman snort & fart over "Life of Crime." Ah, yes, those were the days. Maybe we should sic some Jeffrey Miller poems on Ron—or maybe a copy of Huntsie's treatise on Brooklyn Bridge...

I see my photo of Hunce Voelcker made its way to Exquisite Corpse—thx for giving me photo credit BTW. Must've been Pat Nolan that sent it to you. Weirdly, I can still hear Hunce's laugh in my mind's ear—after all these years...

If you want more geezer pix, I'll be posting them in my Poet Archives album—and if you want pix of someone in particular who haunted The River ca 1980-1996, I might have a negative or two somewheres. Sorry, none of you...

Maureen

Facebook for the dead

Sodden Thought: Facebook asked that I suggest new friends for Norton Buffalo. Somehow I don't think I need to make "friend " suggestions for him. RIP. Ride on. For a minute there, I thought maybe there was a Facebook in heaven that I don't know about. One time I dreamed there was a special phone for the dead so I called my grandmother. It was so real that when I awoke, I was disoriented. And disappointed. It's some deep metaphor though!

Out of the Blue, for W. A. Mathieu

Out of the blue, a reknown composer W. A. Mathieu of Cold Mountain Music, from Sonoma County, called and asked if I was the one who wrote the essay, "I, Poet," and then he quoted a line from it, saying he wanted to use it in a book he's writing on music!

Founder of the Sufi Choir, musical director for The Committee Theater, and Chicago's Second City Theater, instructor at San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Mills College, W. A Mathieu, who goes by Allaudin, was also the arranger for Big Bands including the Stan Kenton, and Duke Ellington orchestras—in those days he was better known as Bill Mathieu. Allaudin is his spiritual name.

The mystic improvisational composer is author of four books and some 20 CDs and casette tape. Pete Seeger once said, "Mathieu has found the words to tell the power of music."

I was of course, stunned, as the essay in question was a decade old (talk about words coming back to haunt you!), but I was even more stunned when he didn't remember who I was. Or meeting me upon several occasions. He had long since lost the connecting threads across the passage of time—which made the phone call all the more amazing as he had to call two people to find my number. Third time's a charm.

Allaudin thought the line was merely from an article he'd saved from 1991. But the real backstory is probably more like this: I was nervous meeting him and I brought something of myself by way of gift to deflect the awkwardness of the moment of first meeting.

That particular moment was an interview for a poem I was about to write. I was collaborating on a project with a brilliant student of Allaudin's, composer-pianist Kirk Whipple of the Unconservatory (formerly of Sonoma County; now located in Miami, with a branch—Cranberry Coast Concert Series, in Onset, MA).

Kirk Whipple was honoring his music teachers and friends with a series of nocturnes entitled Elemental Portraits: Nocturnes for Two Pianos. My job was to listen to Kirk's notes and musical ideas—to freewrite, and then transform it all into drafts. My final job was to meet the subjects and then shape the final poem. I don't normally write poems this way, by interviewing strangers. So it was all a learning curve into the realm of music.

Allaudin's piece was called "Uncle Al's Cloudscape." ( You can listen to a fragment of music.) Sometime in 1991 or 1992—I think it was late winter, or spring, Allaudin and I hiked up to the top of the hill of his back garden located in the outskirts of Sebastopol, and he recounted the day when he saw in the sky a cloud in the shape of a clef note. Pause. Take a breath. Caesura. He took it as a profound sign from the universe. And paid heed.

We were quickly off task: our conversation meandered like a circuitous brook in a vast meadow of possibility. It was an afternoon indelibly etched into my mind. So of course, I was shocked that he didn't remember me.

But he did remember me. Sort of. He just didn't equate that particular me with the me who wrote "I, Poet" so many years ago. Or this present me he was talking to last night on the disembodied ambiguity of the phone. He thought we were all unrelated strangers, but I had the unfair advantage of memory. And then I wondered if there were many lost moments like that where memory and experience are unequally shared among acquaintances.

But the story gets stranger still. Out of the blue, an old college friend, Kathie had just mailed me a "care package' of odds and ends she'd collected over the years. Blame it on the Blue moon.

When Kathie purges her house, she mails the goodies to her friends. In my care package was a xeroxed copy of "I, Poet" folded in amongst trinkets, poetry books and cassette tapes. I was shocked to see the article after all these years. I did not read it, but tucked it away, in the "to do" pile as I'm trying to get much of my work online.

This blog is one vehicle for my old work. Though I am pretty discouraged that the only comments I get these days are spam. Who knew spambots read poetry! (I wish Blogger had a "Captcha' for comments. As the spambots find my open comment links, I have to shut them down. Soon no real people will be able to comment on my work—half the reason why I'm blogging in the first place. But that's fodder for another blogger.)

It was as if that article was waiting to be rediscovered and when I ignored "I, Poet", then the article sent in the heavy artillery. You will read this again. You will own your words. My own words coming back to haunt—or bite me. Clearly, it was a sign from the universe. I haven't written a poem in ages. Mea maxima culpea.

Allaudin wanted provenance for the book he's writing, he wanted the original "I, Poet" article to footnote it, so I hunted it down, scanned, and sent it to him.

I glanced at the line Allaudin wanted to quote: "A poem is like a stone thrown into the pool of our collective unconsciousness. A small splash—concentric ripples spreading out into the conscious dimensions of the larger pool of humanity—can affect change." —Maureen Hurley, from "I, Poet," page 23, The West Sonoma County Paper, June 20 - July 3, 1991.

That exercise gave me the idea to scan in the actual page as a jpg and post it in my blog. I've been bogged down trying to scan bad copies of my articles—reduced to 6 point type. It makes for a lot of slog work.

Is it really worth the effort and time to create these online archives? Who is reading them? Who cares? Besides, I have so few surviving tear sheets, they're rare as hen's teeth. Most of my memorabilia from those days is in storage, but many boxes were destroyed when the shed roof leaked one particularly stormy winter. Unlike Kathie, though we're both childless, I never purged because the published writing is my progeny.

In the beginning, I meticulously saved everything that appeared in print: my doodles, my photos, and my articles. I catalogued the journey of a career in writing. I learned by doing, and working for The Sonoma County Stump with Joe Leary, and then the West Sonoma County Paper with Nick Valentine was a good training ground. Make that a good university of accidental exposure. Right place, right time. And teachers willing to nurture a budding writer.

Allaudin was delighted but not surprised by the circuitous homing pigeon aspect of our connections. Chalked it up to age. The universe works in mysterious ways. Out of the blue, indeed.

I still haven't read "I, Poet" but I've been carefully eyeing it along the edges, cleaning up the margins with Photoshop and I've posted the scan on this site. Maybe it was the last blue moon that triggered this landslide from the past. Instructions from the universe. Have you done your homework?

Soon I will transcribe the piece, but it is readable as is if you double click on it full size. And on the archival front, it also gave me the idea to post the few tear sheets I've scanned in situ along with the transcription as jpgs. I like that.

Maybe I'll write a poem and call it "Out of the Blue."

Dread virus blues

Still slogging out that dread virus—great excuse to hang out in PJs on a Sunday afternoon. Just realized this effin eedjit virus has had me in its danse macabre grip for a fortnight. Neil's got it worse. I should knock on wood. It’s been 2 weeks! I'm just about over it—some coughing jags, but Neil's much worse. I wonder if it's the same recurring bug. Are you ever over it? I'm still trying to wipe visions of nekkid sumo wrestlers up close & personal from the retinas of my eyes!