Bone Island Suite

I went to the Philharmonia Northwest concert with Kathleen Flenniken this afternoon. What an AMAZING show. Seriously, it is one of the best concerts I have been to — ever. Rebecca Loudon received not one but two bouquets and a standing ovation for her poems set to music by Roupen Shakarian. And the soprano was stunning in her flamingo-colored dress. The concert concluded with a terrifically fun Symphony #5 1/2 by Don Gillis (the lost twin of Doby Gillis?). I'm no music expert, but this orchestra is incredibly tight, fluent and spot-on in their playing. Season tickets next year?

More Burning Word

Burning Word was great fun! Despite the stormy weather. OMG: it dumped buckets of rain and blew like a hurricane for hours! At least we had poetry to keep us warm. I thought my workshop went very well, and I had a gas attending two of the other workshops. The readings were diverse, as usual: performance poets with guitars and chants, NW classics Tess Gallagher and Carolyn Kizer, a generous sampling of established poets from near and far, rappers and grad students. Thanks to Victory and John and everybody at WPA.

Susan Rich gave a great workshop on Food Poetry. My favorite part: where she had everybody close their eyes and open their mouths, while she put a piece of food into our mouths (a luscious piece of chocolate), and for us to write about the sensations and images it evoked. Sensual, erotic, and spiritual (I got an image of the Eucharist) all at the same time.

I drove back with Susan and Ilya K., and we got to the dock just in time to catch the 8pm ferry back to Mukilteo. Had a late dinner at the Thai place in West Seattle, and a great conversation about poetry, poets, poems; who we like, who we read, poems that mean the most to us, etc. Thank you Ilya for saying it was "OK" for me to not like John Ashbery. (Shhhh . . . don't tell anyone). ~grin~

PS: I should really read the weather report a little closer before going away to events like this. Silly me had only a short sleeved shirt and a vest. Thank God for Gayle Kaune who lent me the fleece lining from her coat to wear for a while, or I would have froze to death in the workshop tent. It was that kind of festival: at least four different people, over the course of the day, offered me the coat off their back to wear.

See You at Burning Word!

  

Looking forward to the Burning Word Poetry Festival on Whidbey Island, tomorrow. I'll be riding up with Susan Rich and Ilya Kaminski. Check it out here. There will be workshops and readings and artwork and food, and hopefully sunshine! Carolyn Kizer will be receiving a lifetime acheivement award from the Washington Poets Association.

Don't Eat Those Peeps

Had a fun poetry group tonight, which included a baby shower for Jared (he and his wife Julie are due any week now) with cake and presents and general silliness and frivolity. I gave the baby a cute little red and white striped shirt made in Italy. And I gave the dad a tee-shirt and six-pack of beer. Our own RL had actually knitted things for the baby, all lovely and soft and beautiful.

The poems tonight were a trip: including one about a broken heart and hard candy, one arising from the Hanford civilian radiation exposure depostitions, and one made from the Flight 93 transcripts that really gave me the chills.

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From a Joshua Clover essay in Fence. Thanks to Joshua Corey for the link:

A Tale of Two Steins

"Chickamauga is where I'm from and Canada's where I'm bound" doesn't strike me as poetry. On the other hand, "Chickamauga is where I'm from and solitude's where I'm bound" does. Not a poem, not especially good poetry, but poetry. It's in the equivalence (the machine of metaphor in the skin of grammar) drawn between "Chickamauga" and "solitude," which in common speech are not exchangeable terms: one's a place, one's an emotional circumstance. This error - the confusion of kind - sets poetry apart from common speech. That, and line breaks.

. . . read more here.

Check out Kathleen Flenniken's feature on the NEA website here. Yay Kathleen! I remember liking this poem a lot when she first brought it to group 3 or 4 years ago.

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I love my subscription to Word a Day. Here are a couple recent ones:

garbology (gar-BOL-uh-jee) noun

The study of a society or culture by examining what it discards.

[From garbage (which was originally the word for offal from fowls) + -logy
(study).]

Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=garbology

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oniomania (O-nee-uh-MAY-nee-uh, -MAYN-yuh) noun

Compulsive shopping; excessive, uncontrollable desire to buy things.

[From Latin, from Greek xnios (for sale), from onos (price) + -mania.]


I actually have a poem titled "Oniomania," that appeared on Literary Salt a few years ago. Now I need to write one called "Garbology."

What a gorgeous day! Had a nice drive home from Portland. The weather was perfect: like a midsummer day, the sky all blue, the evergreens green as green can be, the maples and elms and ashes all in leaf, the rolling hills blooming with wild mustard flowers. Where else can you drive past not one but two active volcanoes within a half an hour? Of course, I am referring to our own Mt. St. Helens and Mt Rainier. They were stunning today: covered with gleaming white snow, a tiny wisp of cloud, and seeming so close that you could lick them. It must be an atmospheric effect brought on by the clear skies and the rising temperatures, or something, these Spring days when the mountains seem larger and closer than possible. I love it.

My only question to the freeway drivers of Oregon and Washington: What is it you don't understand about "Keep Right Except To Pass"? ~grin~

Wordstock II

Wordstock has been fun. Got to meet several new people, including Clem Stark (who has great poems about his work as a carpenter), Joseph Stroud (CCP poet from Santa Cruz), Amy Uyematsu (who is also a HS math teacher in LA, as well as a former 60's activist), Matt Yurdana (a Portland poet whose first book was just published by U of Tampa(?) press, and who happens to work in medical software). Saw Joyce Carol Oates and Ed Hirsch in the green room, but was too shy to introduce myself. Also caught up with several old and new friends including Martha Silano, Kevin Craft, Scott Hightower.

The reading was a hoot. I loved Jeannine's poems! Her female supehero stuff works on several levels, from pop culture kitsch, to the more mythic and profound. My reading was a little problematical, as I found out about an hour before that I had left my second book manuscript at home! I suppose I could have just read from Saying the World, but I really wanted to read from the new book, as well. After looking for a place to print out a few pages from my lap top, and coming up empty, I decided to read directly from the laptop . . . and it actually worked out fine, once I got a handle on the scrolling.

Then, a dear friend in the audience had her cellphone go off just as I started to read the first poem. Not just a subtle little ring or buzz, but a choo-choo train song playing fairly loudly. She had to dig for a while in her purse/backpack to find said phone, as the song continued to play and she mouthed to me with an anguished look on her face: "I Am So Sorry!" It was actually kind of funny, really. And if I had it to do over again I would have stopped reading the poem, and made a joke about it, then asked if there was anyone else who had a song they'd like to play before we started, or something silly like that. And then started the poem over again. No worries . . . Next time . . .

Went out for drinks after at the author's area and met a memoir writer whose new book is called "FBI Girl." About growing up with a father who she discovered later was an FBI agent. Sounds fascinating.

Not sure I'll make it to much of the fest today, as I have to drive home, and work early tomorrow . . . and it is sunny out! I'd like to get outside.

"PORTLAND, Ore. - An Oregon man who went to a hospital complaining of a headache was found to have 12 nails embedded in his skull from a suicide attempt with a nail gun, doctors say.

Surgeons removed the nails with needle-nosed pliers and a drill, and the man survived with no serious lasting effects, according to a report on the medical oddity in the Journal of Neurosurgery." see full story here.

My oh my. I'll need to add this to the list of questions I ask patients who are complaining of a headache: "Do you have a nail gun at home?"

MHE 512

Had a great time with the Human Face of Medicine class at UW today. The class had been assigned to do close readings of several of my poems from Saying the World, as well as some readings from the textbook A Life in Medicine (including a great Lewis Thomas essay, "Leech, Leech, etc, " and a terrific Bulgakov short story, "Trial by Rotation"). We spent most of the class discussing the poems, and I think it went over fairly well. It was fascinating to hear their takes and interpretations, and to hear what questions the poems brought up for them. They were mostly first and second year medical students, and some had had previous careers in other medically related fields; and several of them seemed pretty well-read in terms of world literature; so the discussions were pretty high-level. Some of the poems were written over 15 years ago, and so it was really fun to cast my mind back and recall what they had arisen from, what were my intentions at the time, and etc; and to compare that to how I feel about the poems now, what I see in them now. And then to connect the poems to actual clinical medicine, and how it is practiced. It was fascinating and fun, and I hope the students enjoyed it even half as much as I did. Thanks Tom and Denise for inviting me. I can hardly wait to go again next week!

Wordstock!

I'm looking forward to taking a little trip down to Portland for Wordstock this weekend. It looks like a pretty huge festival, with over 200 authors reading, workshops, a bookfair, and etc. I'll be reading with Jeannine Hall Gailey on the Mountain Writer's Poetry Stage at 3pm Saturday. They are putting me up in the Benson Hotel, which looks like a wonderful old hotel in the downtown area. I haven't decided yet whether to drive down or to take the train. Driving is more flexible, but I'd also have to find parking, and it's sort of a boring drive down I-5. The train is less flexible, in terms of timing; but it's a little more scenic of a trip (not much), and it is far more relaxing: I could actually get some reading and writing done on board. Maybe even take a nap. Hmmmm . . . . decisions, decisions.

Poetic Intentions

Congratulations to my good friend Jeff Crandall, whose art show "Poetic Intentions" recently opened at the Museum of Northwest Art, in LaConner, WA. It looks like a fascinating show, and will coincide with the Skagit River Poetry festival, this May. Check it out!

"In this installation, created specifically for this gallery, Crandall explores the transparency and fragmentary nature of language. The exhibit begins with Exploded Sonnets, a mobile-like glass curtain of words that divides up two original sonnets into their even syllables, each floating like a bubble of sound. Plays on words, containerization, advertising and religion are explored through glass-mounted collages, sandblasted glass spheres and bottles. "All Bottled Up" is a display of 85 cobalt blue wine bottles each with different human emotions, conditions, and other things we keep inside. The "What Lies Within" series uses hanging glass panes on a steel backdrop with light and shadow to point out the LIE within BELIEVE and other ironic words-within-words. Crandall works in Seattle, as both a nationally recognized poet and an accomplished glass artist. Poetic Intentions runs through June 4, 2006."

AWP Atlanta

I can't believe it's time for this already:
"AWP is now accepting proposals for our 2007 Conference & Bookfair, February 28 - March 3, 2007, in Atlanta, Georgia. The deadline to submit conference event proposals is May 1, 2006. For more information, or to propose an event for AWP's 2007 Conference in Atlanta, visit us [here]. "

I'd love to go to Atlanta. Anybody have any great ideas for a panel proposal? Please back channel.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

 

What a dark and beautiful movie. First of all, you must know I love Tommy Lee Jones. And this is a fine piece of directing and acting. The scenes of the Mexican outback are gorgeous. But they are leavened by the stark poverty and desperation of the people. This movie is about the lengths that grief will take you, when it comes to the life and death of a friend. And in that way it is a lot like "Brokeback Mountain," oddly enough. With the dead Melquiades' "Jimenez" becoming the resting place that Jack and Ennis dreamed of.

 

Happy Easter (from Live Journal)

 

I'm sorry. I know this is gruesome, but I just couldn't resist.