LocusPoint is Fresh

Congratulations to Charlie Jensen and all the guest editors. LocusPoint is up, and there is some really fine work to be found there. Visit the Seattle contribution, edited by Rebecca Loudon here.

Or

I'm on call for a week, starting tonight at 5pm. Hope it is calm and quiet. I know there is a bili baby to see in the am, but that's about all so far.

Loved this poem in the new issue of Poetry. What fun with just two letters. Very OR-iginal! (Sorry, the formatting is a little off. The shorter two-line stanzas are indented.)



Or,

Or Oreo, or
worse. Or ordinary.
Or your choice
of category

or
Color

or any color
other than Colored
or Colored Only.
Or “Of Color”

or
Other

Or theory or discourse
or oral territory.
Oregon or Georgia
or Florida Zora

or
Opportunity

or born poor
or Corporate. Or Moor.
Or a Noir Orpheus
or Senghor

or
Diaspora

or horrendous
and tore-up journey.
Or performance. Or allegory’s armor
of ignorant comfort.

or
Worship

or reform or a sore chorus.
Or Electoral Corruption
or important ports
of Yoruba or worry

or
Neighbor

or fear of . . .
of terror or border.
Or all organized
minorities.

— Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poetry, October 2006

Are You a Scissor Sister?

  

A great Scissor Sisters concert live on LOGO tonight. Lots of tracks from their new album Ta Dah. I loved hearing "She's My Man," "Kiss You Off," "Don't Feel Like Dancin'," and "Filthy, Good & Gorgeous" live. Jake Shears (or whatever his name is now) prancing around the stage like a new-age Puck, his voice going from a catty twang to a piercing falsetto. Did you know he started his career as a teenage drag queen in Seattle, singing covers of James Bond movie songs? I have the pictures . . .

xop

From Today's Word-a-Day

theriac (THEER-ee-ak) noun

1. Treacle or molasses.

2. An antidote to poison.

[From Latin theriaca (antidote), from Greek therion (wild beast).]

"The original theriac was made by combining 60-70 ingredients (including
the flesh of the viper) mixed with honey. It was supposed to be an antidote
against all poisons and thus the word is also used in the sense of cure-all.

Around twenty years ago, there was a radiation therapy machine named
Therac-25. Its buggy software delivered occasional massive overdoses of
radiation and killed at least six patients. This infamous device is now
a standard case study in the matters of software testing and reliability.
With a name like that..."

Fantastic Four!

Oh my gawd! The newest episode of Project Runway showed tonight at 9PM instead of 10PM, and so I almost missed it, as I was at my "other" poetry group (with KF, RL, RS, JL, luv ya all) until almost 9:30. But what a joyful surprise — no one was eliminated: *all four designers* are headed to fashion week! It's a triumph for inclusion and liberality.

Dean told me that Scissor Sisters played "Don't Feel Like Dancin'" at intermission on So You Think You Can Dance (how ironic?). And now, on Noah's Arc, is the followup to Noah's horrific gay-bashing. With his great line about how a victim often feels shame, and that what the prosecution needs to do is to put the shame where it belongs, with the attackers. And he and Wade ("I could never hurt you")getting back together . . . hot hot hot.


Now back to your regular programming.

Open Books

Went with RB to a poetry reading at Open Books for Stan Sanvel Rubin's Hidden Sequel, and Shannon Borg's Corset. The highlights of the reading (for me) were Shannon Borg's poem "Brief Grammatical Romance" about the difference between "O" and "Oh." And Stan Rubin's series of poems for the murder weapons in the game "Clue." Lovely dinner at Costas Opus beforehand, with an interesting discussion about, among other things, past loves, memory, distance, and "phone calls from the dead."

PS: check out Rick Barot's fascinating essay on Rilke and his blue hydrangea (I never knew that Rilke preferred to write only on blue paper), in the latest issue of VQR.

 

A lot going on at work today. This is how I feel. 

Synchronicities

A fun poetry group meeting in Port Townsend yesterday. We had a picnic lunch first, with chicken-pear-curry soup, tomato salad, potato salad, bean salad, olives, wine, rice crackers and salsa. Then we sat in Kathryn's back yard around a little campfire pit, on huge cedar logs, and read each other's poems. Gorgeous and sunny and warm. All of us able to sit in shorts and short sleeves. A fitting end to summer.

It's always amazing to me how even though we write in relative isolation, we often have recurring themes in the work we bring to group. Synchronicities. Yesterday we had poems about: raking/burning leaves and the coming of fall; leaping salmon, spawning before dying; reading obits; a bombed library with burning pages falling from the sky; dreams of darkness; the line of midnight. It sounds a little heavy writing it now, but they were all really beautiful poems.

Missed one ferry on the way back and had to wait for the next. Puget Sound a deep dreamy blue, and dotted with sailboats. Mount Rainier and Mount Baker all icy and white and saying "hello" to each other across the waves. A lovely chat with R and T in the car. You can't really ever be in a hurry when a ferry is involved.

Now . . . back to the working week.

Gorgeous in Seattle today: warm, sunny, blue skies. And to top it off: UW beats UCLA 29-19 after being down 13-0 in the first quarter, 16-0 midway through the second quarter. Great game. Congratulations Tyrone. Go Dawgs!

No Captain Fantastic

Dean and I tried to go see Elton John last night at Key Arena. We didn't have tickets, but on a whim went to the ticket window about 7pm. They actually had a few seats on the floor in front of the stage, 14th row. But they cost $126 each. We decided we loved Elton, but not quite that much. We went to Broadway instead, and cruised books at Bailey Coy (almost bought a copy of BAP, but resisted at the last minute), then we went to Septieme for dessert. I had a flan and a cappuccino, Dean had an orange-almond cake and a latte. It was lovely out, a still-late-summer rather than early-fall kind of evening. I missed the sunset, though. Rebecca says it was spectacular.

Baked Tomato Sauce

It's really a simple recipe:

Halve tomatoes and place in glass baking dish
Dress with olive oil, garlic, onion, spices
Bake at 350-400 for about an hour, or until tomatoes begin to carmelize
Allow to cool before transferring to food processor
Process to desired consistency
Use now or freeze


The baked, smoky flavor of this tomato sauce is to die for.

*

PS: Welcome Aaron Smith , of Blue on Blue Ground fame, to the blogosphere.

Ah September . . .

The last tomatoes of the season. 

Today's Task:

To find the Angel within the Changeling.

Fall is Here Early

I stayed a little late at work last night, finishing patient charts in EMR, and when I walked out to my car at 7:45 pm it was already DARK! When I got home, Dean had prepared a lovely dinner of chicken and end-of-summer vegetables and penne pasta. It was past 9 pm by the time we were done eating. When I got up this morning at 6:30 am it was STILL DARK! How did this happen so quickly? Where did summer go? Where did the light go?

Don't miss the reading today at Open Books: Kathleen Flenniken, 3:00pm (with party to follow).

from the Open Books website calendar:
"Kathleen Flenniken's just published first collection, Famous ($17.95 Bison Books), received the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, a fitting honor for this wry, poignant, and endearing book. The fame represented here is not so much that of the recognizable name, though some do appear (a moving poem that touches on Mary Todd Lincoln's difficult life is included). Rather it is the fame that translates as a kind of self-knowledge, available to us only as we reach middle age. "Aren't all of us / waiting to be discovered?," Ms. Flenniken writes. Her kind and inventive searching allows for many discoveries -- in her own life and in the lives of many of us "minor characters," revealing pleasures, limitations, sadnesses, desires. She is cognizant that despite our plans, much is out of our control -- "The menu unfolds / like a map and for a moment your trip // feels intentional." Losses (her deceased parents are a sweet presence) cannot be avoided. Nor can failures, like those of parents at a school recital who clap "heroically, like the parents / they've meant to be." Her honesty is tempered with an appreciation of the power of forgiveness, primarily of ourselves. And with a sense of humor -- "Nature abhors a vacuum / but God loves a good vacuuming." These poems both give our problematic lives serious attention and remind us not to take ourselves too seriously. "