The Artichoke's Heart

Oh to unknot and unknow myself
like the deep threads of the artichoke's heart
opening into purple flower.

Crocosmia Lucifer in the side yard. Ah, summer . . . . 

Dry Lightning

I love voile more
than I love olive.
But violet, I love it
more than I love
voile.

O evil! O
vile! Violence
springs from love ‘n’ ice,
from nice love,
a lone vice.

But how does complaint
become compliant?
Precious beget
precarious?

Oh my — such
limitation in-
imitably ends in
imitation.

Eternity’s an entirety.
A word’s a sword.

And I’ve forgot
is
to forgive.

Happy Birthday!

Hey Everybody: Make sure to stop by the divine Rebecca Loudon's place, and wish her a big Happy Birthday. July 29th, 195x: do you remember where you were that day?

My Centrum workshop group: Bob, Larry, Jerry, Virginia, and Julie. I miss you already. 

What Robert Frost Poem are You?

A Peck of Gold

Dust always blowing about the town,
Except when sea-fog laid it down,
And I was one of the children told
Some of the blowing dust was gold.

All the dust the wind blew high
Appeared like gold in the sunset sky,
But I was one of the children told
Some of the dust was really gold.

Such was life in the Golden Gate:
Gold dusted all we drank and ate,
And I was one of the children told,
'We all must eat our peck of gold'.

*
You're rather innocent, and every cloud has a silver lining for you. Even if things are going really badly right now, they'll get better. Believe it in your heart, and it'll come true! (Q: Who writes this stuff?)


What Robert Frost poem are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Doppelganger

Your picture that day on every front page
by the story that was written about you.
Then your face gleaming from the window
of the car stopped next to mine at the light.
How I smiled and you followed me home,
stayed after to watch Our Beautiful Launderette.

Stopped by the light on our front picture
window, to watch your face next to mine.
Gleaming then from the story about how you
and I stayed after at that launderette,
the day your beautiful car smiled me home.
Every page that followed was written of you.

More anagram fun

Tony, I couldn't resist:

The New Sincerity

Intense Witchery
Tiny New Heretics
In Thy Wise Center
Sneer Then, Icy Wit

CONGRATULATIONS!

To my good friend, fellow writing group member, and fellow Floating Bridge Press editor, Kathleen Flenniken! Winner of the 2005 Prairie Schooner Book Award for her manuscript, Famous. Much deserved, Kathleen. Kudos to you.

"Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press are pleased to announce the winners of the 2005 Prairie Schooner Book Prizes. The winners will each receive a $3,000 prize and publication of their books through the University of Nebraska Press.

POETRY: Kathleen Flenniken

Kathleen Flenniken's poems appear in Southern Review, Mid-American Review, the Iowa Review, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. She is the recepient of fellowships from the NEA and Artist Trust and her poems have been included in the King County Poetry on Buses Project. She holds BS and MS degrees in civil engineering and was a practicing engineer for eight years. She lives in Seattle, Washington. Kathleen Flenniken's winning collection, Famous, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2006."

I Have a Beehive Inside My Heart

It's the last day of Centrum. It has all gone by so fast!
Yesterday's lecture by Kim Addonizio was a hoot. Because most of the students were at the participant open mic until quite late, and her lecture was at 8:30 the next morning, she told everybody she would be serving Bloody Marys; and sure enough, there was all the fixings for Bloody Marys, as well as mimosas (orange juice, champagne), lined up on the stage at the front of the lecture hall. And EVERYBODY fixed themselves a little drinky before Kim started speaking. A great lecture about success, and failure, and the life of a writer, and a little about her mother (who was a four-time US Open Tennis champion, but still on some level felt a failure).

For my last class, one of the things the students will be doing is reciting the poem they chose to memorize. As I also usually do the exercises I give (it's only fair), I will be reading a little poem that I memorized as well. It's from Antonio Machado:

"Last Night, As I Was Sleeping"

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error!
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.


It's a lovely poem. I think it captures the essential metaphor-making ability of poetry. Those "marvelous errors" that we make when we apprehend the world in disordered and accidental and magical ways.

Shake & Bake

I tried a fun new exercise with my workshop yesterday. It's a variation of a Chase Twichell exercise, where you take a poem/draft of your own, get out some scissors and tape, cut all the individual lines up into strips, and rearrange the strips to find new connections and and rhythms and ways of saying things (and to break the chains of strict narrative sequence), then tape the new poem together onto a page.

For my workshop, we varied this by making it a group exercise. The six of us each chose a poem of about 15 to 20 lines, cut it into strips of lines (including the title), then put all the lines into one bag and shook them up (hence the name "Shake & Bake"). Then we each drew 15 lines, and constructed a poem from them. It took about 15 - 20 minutes to do, and the resulting poems where actually pretty amazing.

Here are are a couple of them (the odd caps, and punctuation, and etc. left as is):


Televison is a great help.

I have a new way to exercise.
sitting on a log,
Where watchful cannons stood
waiting for the waitress
her gangly arms
gray eyes turning an unblinking yellow green,
with sand and shells at my feet.
Gulls and fog horns,
sounding for the sun.
When I get weary I prefer the outdoor programs
as I tackle, block, run, pass and kick.
too much touching
is their afterlife, a final gathering

(composed by LE)


I call it the Professor

bequeathing a fountain of feathers
My mind dances between
a going away, as a return.
The Harold Hill "Think" method.
of a unifying vision.
An inactive
LEGACY
to avoid a blow to the jaw.
I go across town to the station, where
in my head,
beside scrap wood and old plumbing pipe.
out to the horizon,
chisels and creativity.
unlike sparrows in Kansas.

(composed by JG)

Roving Day

I had about 20 students for my "roving day" workshop today. It's a new thing at Centrum this year, where students go to a worksop session with any of the presenters in the morning, and then rotate to another one in the afternoon. I presented seven brief word play exercises (including anagrams, abecedarian, palindromes, Scrabble poem, Parody poem, and Tabloid poem) and let them pick one to work on for the session. The students were really enthusiatic and got right to it. Just about everybody got a decent start on a poem, if not a fully realized draft. And a good time laughing at the more humorous results.
My reading is tonight. I am sharing the bill with that hottie Irishman Michael Collins (who is sunbathing on the lawn outside his cottage as I write this). Ah . . . the visual on that, I will leave to your imagination.

Being Ilya

Having a great time at the Centrum Conference. The weather is fantastic. The participants are engaged. Yesterday morning, Ilya Kaminsky opened with a fascinating craft lecture exploring conflict, the personal, and the political. Last night, after a terrific evening performance, with Bhanu Kapil reading from her book of poems and notebook about the feral children discovered (and studied) by a missionary in India in the 1920's; and Lesley Hazelton reading in a rich throaty voice from her biography of Mary (as in "the Virgin"); a group of us went out to town for drinks: Lesley, Bhanu, Ilya Kaminsky, Rebecca Brown, and myself. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was being projected onto a white sheet dividing two of the rooms of the bar; and it was just a hoot trying to explain the significance of this odd cultural phenomenon to Ilya. Walking back to the car later, as a 4/5 full moon glittered on the water, Ilya incited us all to join arms and do a little Russian dance, which nearly made us fall into the street, and led Lesley to proclaim: "we are now officially drunk." We laughed and laughed driving back to Centrum, each of us reciting whatever words of Russian we could think of — das vadanya, nyet, bortsch, wodka — to Ilya's great delight.

Workshop

I saw this poem on the Poetry Daily "poem from last year" archive, this morning. Thought it was very apropos . . .


WORKSHOP

Where I come from, men worked all day, then came home
and worked some more. Retirement just meant mornings
in the basement or garage. And more than one of my neighbors
dropped dead there, slumped by a whining band saw.

These men walk beside me into my workshop where someone
has already moved the chairs into a circle. They stand there
and smoke or look down at their callused hands. The naked
emotion embarrasses them, not to mention the girls' short
skirts or boys with earrings.

So they look at the window that won't close, eye the chair
with one uneven leg, the desk that needs refinishing. Boy, if
they could just get their hands on a hammer, a couple of shims,
and some sandpaper they'd fix everything in no time flat.


Ron Koertge

I've Been Trying to Reach You Since Yesterday

I am feeling much more relaxed now that my lecture is over. I was a little worried being the 2pm slot, because it was after lunch, and the sun had just come out after a morning of icky rain. But there was a pretty good turnout. I'd given this kind of lecture to medical audiences in the past (medical students, residents, other doctors and allied heath care providers) but never to an audience of writers, and I was pleased by how well it was received. It also always helps to start with jokes: this one cracked them up totally:

Doctor: I have some bad news, and some very bad news.
Patient: OK. Give me the bad news first.
Doctor: Your lab tests are back, and you have only 24 hours to live.
Patient: That's terrible! What could possibly be worse?
Doctor: I've been trying to reach you since yesterday.

But, seriously, I think they enjoyed the ideas about poetry, medicine, and narrative competence. The idea of using poetry to express as well as to contain intense emotions and experiences. And I got to sneak in reading more than a few poems. (During the Q & A I even got a request to read "the C-section poem.")

My students are great. I'm really enjoying working with them. And it's been fun to hang out a little with some of the other presenters: Paisley Rekdal, Lesley Hazelton, Rebecca Brown are all just a hoot.

And there has been some incredible readings: particularly Debra Magpie Earling's reading of this devastating scene from her new book, about the ambush of a medicine woman by three men from another tribe. Brutal and beautfil and poetic. The image of them cutting her heart in two still haunts me.