I've been reading Alistair McCartney's The End of the World Book very slowly, just a few entries at a time, usually before bed. It's really hard to classify: it's sort of a memoir, but it's also sort of like prose-poems or flash fiction. All arranged in alphabetical order. He has hilarious and quirky stories about his family, his life, gay boys, popular culture, politics, dreams, death, etc etc. Here is a sample, that I read to Dean last night, from the Chapter "H":

Holes, Black

As some point humans will no longer use the word boy. Instead, we'll refer to young men as black holes. I love black holes, those stars that can't bear being stars, like a boy who can't bear the weight of being a boy, and so collapses in on himself, sucking everyone and everything that is around him in, all objects. Surely everyone has known a boy like this, a boy from whom nothing, not even light, can escape. Surely everyone has gotten dangerously close to such a boy.

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Now, imagine a couple dozen or so of these little pieces -- some only a sentence or a paragraph long, some one or two pages long at most -- for each letter of the alphabet. And that in their accumulation, you begin to get the faint framework of a memoir, a story, a point of view. It's really pretty amazing. And the perfect bedtime book. Not because it puts you to sleep, but because it sends you off to dreams, and/or other interesting places.

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Dean and I think there is a 40-50yo woman sleeping in the park across the street. We've run into her several times now on our after-dinner walks. She is dressed well enough, and is holding some plastic folders in her arm, as if she is just coming home from work. But then you notice the couple bags of belongings stuffed under the bench, where Dean found her napping one afternoon. We talked to her briefly, and she was very vague, a little anxious, possibly chronically mentally ill. We feel sorry for her, and wonder why she isn't connected to resources downtown, or if perhaps she is fleeing those resources. One of our neighbors has chatted with her, too, and brought her some fried chicken and some toiletries (there is a nice public bathroom with a heated air hand-dryer in the park, where one could wash up and change clothes). We brought her some bread and cheese last night. Dean asked her her name, and suggested to her that it might not be safe to be sleeping in the park at night. But who knows, maybe it is safer than the shelters downtown. We both feel sort of odd about it. Perhaps a little middle class guilt? Perhaps not knowing if helping (food, toiletries) is really just enabling? Dean half-joked that he would think of her as the Buddha, and treat her with kindness. And see what he could learn from her. Who knows, she will probably be gone tomorrow.

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PS: Did you know Obama published some poems as an undergraduate?

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From A Word a Day:

popinjay
PRONUNCIATION:
(POP-in-jay)

MEANING:
noun: Somone who indulges in vain and empty chatter.

ETYMOLOGY:
Via French and Spanish from Arabic babbaga (parrot). The last syllable changed to jay because some thought the word referred to that bird instead of a parrot.

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From my friend Jeff: a link to a fascinating "Ambigram" site, where computerized typography can be used to make a word like "Poet" read the same right side up and upside down. Or you can take a word like "Love" and have it read "Hate" upside down. Or you could take two names, like "Peter" and "Dean" and have it read as one or the other depending on how it is flipped. Check it out. It's fun to play around with different words and to see what you get. But I am not sure I'd buy one ($19.95 per image). I believe they are intended to be used for tattoo patterns. And based on the look of some of the fonts, ahem, prison tattoos.

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And another amazing Goldbarth poem in the recent issue of Poetry. The language and idioms from science that he uses are just delightful:

Marble-Sized Song


Does she love you? She says yes, but really
how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion,
undoing its petals and laminae, and going in
below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical
coffer where self-understanding is storaged away,
and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study
in its nakedness as it spins
in a clinical light?—the way
we all, in our various individual versions
of this common human urge, go in,
and in, and in, the physicist down
to the string-vibration underlying matter, and
the Appalachia fiddler getting so
(as she puts it) "into my music," sound becomes
a flesh for her to intimately ("in"-timately)
enter, "its thick and its sweetbreads."
Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feigns
that he's insulted, but for certainty
you'll need to delicately strip the bark away
and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide
of the pith and can augur the chitterlings
—the way the philosopher can't accept a surface
assumption of truth, but needs to peel back
the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer
into a blow-away foam, and then with pick
and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin
spelunking through those splayed-out caverns
under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried
—the way the diver descends for the pearl,
the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down
the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way
the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes
a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in,
and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in,
the way the man in the opium den is floating forever,
toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center
of his head.... If we could stand beyond the border
of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem
that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency
that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe's
irreversible expansion out, and out ... and each
of us, a contribution to that task.
My friend John's wife received the news: a "growth,"
a "mass," on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious.
And the primary-care physician said: Yes,
we must go in and in. That couldn't be the final word!
And the second-opinion physician said: Yes,
my sweet-and-shivering-one,
my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness,
someone's-dearest, you
who said the prayers at Juliette's grave, who drove
all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you
on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin
in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi,
yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance,
yes we must go in and in.


-- Albert Goldbarth

Poetry
July/August 2008

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Potpourri

Check out an audio of "Fugue" at the Poetry Foundation website. Perhaps I "over-explained" a bit at the outset. But I'm happy with how it turned out.

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And while you are at it, also check out this mildly horrifying but funny in its own way blog and You Tube video, of Christian Missionaries using "Anagrammer." My oh my.

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Had a lovely dinner with B & E outside in the garden last night, grilled lamb and orzo and salad and bread and wine, and little raspberry tarts made with freshly picked berries. Sat up late talking outside on deck chairs. Bob (who recently turned 80) is going to teach English in Russia for a semester this winter. (I hope I am still that active when I am that age.) We said goodnight not long before the rain and thunderstorms came.

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A poem accepted by Prairie Schooner, "Lingua Franca," will appear in a special Portuguese-American section, sometime next year. Yay! And thank you to David Oliveira.

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War Crimes Poet

Excerpts: Karadzic's poems

The publisher will not say how he got hold of the poems
A book of what is said to be new poetry by fugitive Bosnian war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic has been launched in Serbia.
The man accused of genocide against Bosnian Muslims largely writes about nature in the poems - said by a BBC translator to be as "bad in the original as they sound in the English translation" - but there are also frequent references to war and violence.

Three of the poems, including one called Sarajevo, follow here:

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Pol Pot was a poet, too. And Hitler was a watercolorist.

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I picked up this hilarious book in the airport: The Daily Candy Lexicon: Words That Don't Exist but Should. It was written/compiled by a group of office workers, and is a list of funny invented words for things about Work, Love, Food, Shopping, Nightlife, Travel, etc. It's very Sex in the City. Here are a few examples from the Technology section:

E-mnesia: n. the condition of having sent or received an email and having no recollection of it whatsoever.

Laptopless: adj. Working on one's home computer while semi-clothed.

Mouse Potato: n. The wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

Phony Call: n. The call you make when you pray you'll get some one's voicemail.

Yellular: n. The loudness one adopts in response to a bad cellphone connection, in the misguided hope that talking louder will improve it.

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I listened to Obama's amazing speech in Berlin while waiting for my flight. Pretty amazing stuff. Just hearing the German people cheer. It gave me chills. And made me proud to be an American for the first time in a long time.

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Had a pretty easy flight home. The low clouds began evaporating around the north end of Vancouver Island, and so there was just gorgeous scenery the whole way down the coast and into Seattle: blue ocean, miles and miles of mountainous islands covered in forest, a maze of shimmering inlets and and rivers and streams, sailboats and ferries, the snow-capped Olympics in the distance. It really is a beautiful part of the country this time of year.

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Now back to work in clinic today. I love getting away to poetry conferences and readings and such. But I always come back looking forward to seeing my patients again.

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I've had a great time at the UAA Low-Res MFA. What a fun group of people! It looks like the inaugural residency went off without any major glitches (which is no small feat!). I was a little late to the party (arriving on day 10 of a 12-day residency) but everybody made me feel completely at home. I joked that it was a little like being the marathoner who sneaks in at the last mile, all full of energy, while the rest of the pack is at their max and feeling the burn (wasn't there a Seinfeld episode with that?).

Anyway, one of the bonuses of being a guest speaker/presenter is that I get to go to all the other presentations, which included an amazing master class with Linda McCarriston on the Lyric-Bardic dialectic, and an equally superb fiction class with Rich Chiappone on "Reading Like a Writer." I was sad to have missed other faculty presentations, but got to chat with many of them. Good to see old friend Judith Barrington, and meet David Stevenson (the new res dir), Valerie M, Derek B, Zack R, Eva S, and others. A smart, dedicated group!

I think my Narrative Medicine and Line Breaks/Line Endings workshop went over well. It was the very last session of the residency, but energy still seemed high. And the students did really good work with the exercise (including the prose writers!). In fact, one prose student said to me something like, "OMG, I finally understand what free verse poets are doing!"

The reading Tuesday night was really fun. There was a fairly good turnout, with a good number of people from the community there. Including a few health care professionals (and closet writers), who introduced themselves to me afterwards. Also an old friend, MT, who I hadn't seen in over ten years, who lives in Anchorage now, saw the reading in the paper and came. We went out for a drink and a snack afterwards at Captain Cooks (?) in a swanky hotel downtown. Fun fun!

A nice dinner and reception at the end of the residency last night (Wednesday). So fun to see everybody, faculty and students, up and dancing to B-52's and Aretha Franklin and Nirvana and etc. I hadn't danced in years and just had a hoot.

Breakfast now, and then a flight home.

Toodles.

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Northern Exposure

On my way to Anchorage. A reading tonight with Nancy Lord, and a class tomorrow (Narrative Medicine & Line Endings/Line Breaks). Looking forward to meeting the all the UAA Low-Res MFA folks!

I try not to be judgemental of others, but this sounds really strange:

What's Up With Katie's Hands?
. . . Later that day Cruise escorted his wife to their car. It was then that a photographer caught a glimpse of her ungloved hand, which had a strange dark hue. The discoloration is the result of a Scientology purification ritual called the Purification Rundown, sources told Perez Hilton. New converts to Scientology are supposed to ingest massive doses of vitamin B3, aka Niacin, which some say causes the hands to turn purple.

It's still cool in the mornings, but the afternoons and evenings have been perfect summer weather. I worked most of the morning yesterday on the sonnet series. I guess it is not really a crown, per se, but a sonnet redouble, or "heroic crown." But they really aren't sonnets in any strict sense. In fact one of the poems is a prose poem, another is a list, another is a letter. But each of the 14 poems will have a line that repeats, and that is used to make the 15th. That's all I know for sure at this point. And even that may change. HAHAHAHA.

Still, it is fascinating to be working on a series of persona poems, and to see how the different characters speak to each other. Or how a bit of one person's story ends up as a sideline in another person' story. Sort of like Master's Spoon River Anthology (which Gary Lilly lectured on a few days ago at Centrum).

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K & B were in town last night, and called to invite us to go out to dinner. Instead, we had them over here to grill. Very spur of the moment, which I love. They are the kind of best friends we feel comfortable not having to plan and schedule with, but just going with the flow. We had grilled mussels as the appetizer, with Metaxa sidecars. And then some vegetable coos coos served with seafood kabobs made with prawns, scallops and ahi tuna, seasoned with chili spices and garlic and butter. The ahi came out a little overcooked for my taste, but all in all it was quite a nice combo.

After dinner we took a walk around the park across the street. Then came back and had wine and shortbread cookies and sat in lawn chairs on the deck talking as the sun was going down. Such a fine evening.

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Tonight Dean and I plan to grill some lamb chops (I know, it not very politically correct right now to eat lamb, and other red meats, but I love it). Then we will indulge in some inane pop culture and go see Mama Mia! I hear Meryl Streep is great in the lead role. I can hardly wait. My feet are dancing and tapping already.

Kay Ryan named US poet laureate. Yippee!! You GO girl!

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And in other news: a past poet laureate, Ted Kooser, still carries on, featuring a poem a week (or so) in the nation's newspapers. I really enjoyed the one featured this week, from Patrick Phillips' new book, The Boy:


Piano

Touched by your goodness, I am like
that grand piano we found one night on Willoughby
that someone had smashed and somehow
heaved through an open window.

And you might think by this I mean I'm broken
or abandoned, or unloved. Truth is, I don't
know exactly what I am, any more
than the wreckage in the alley knows
it's a piano, filling with trash and yellow leaves.

Maybe I'm all that's left of what I was.
But touching me, I know, you are the good
breeze blowing across its rusted strings.

What would you call that feeling when the wood,
even with its cracked harp, starts to sing?


c 2008 by Patrick Phillips. Reprinted from his most recent book of poetry, Boy, University of Georgia Press, 2008


PS: I *love* how this poem is a broken/sprung sonnet of sorts.

Anne Waldman gave a terrific performance last night. I especially enjoyed her reading of "Stereo" from Marriage, A Sentence. Her John Cage stuff was a little out there for my taste. But it was fascinating to hear all the singing. Sort of like when a priest sings the words at a mass, except she was more like a priestess or a witch, singing spells.

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Joan Larkin gave a reading the night before, from her new and selected My Body. Also some new work, a novel written in sonnets, which was really very funny, not at all what I was expecting from high-fallutin sonnets. I stayed after to have her sign a book, and thank her again for taking a poem of mine for Bloom a while back. It was good to finally meet her in person.

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I am getting a ton of drafting done on my "Expedition" poems. I was totally on a roll yesterday. I got something written for all 14 poems. Some more than others, but still. Very raw, very wild, but I see the whole series taking shape, and I like where it is going, what I am discovering, what the character are revealing to me. Maybe because I am so close to the sea here -- ships sailing, gulls crying, salt air and tides -- and there is that connection?

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I think my first line breaks lecture/workshop went over well. Several people who missed it have asked for the handout. I hope today's goes as well. It is a different lecture/workshop, and perhaps a bit more "academic" than the first, looking at the "kinetics" and "emotion/affect" of line breaks/line endings. We'll see . . .

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Met a fellow blogger at the Anne Waldman after-party: Saint Nobody from NY. What a hoot, Amy! We gossiped about all of you out there in the blogosphere. Especially RK.

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PS: went to Jeannine's Haiku and Haibun workshop and had a gas. Wrote my first Haibun. Thanks Jeannine!

The weather in Port Townsend is awesome. Sunny and blue with a light breeze blowing in from the sound. Everybody seems to be in great spirits and glad to be here. I am all checked in and getting ready for my first workshop session. Hope it goes well . . .

Dinner tonight with friends, and then all day tomorrow to hang out and write. My goal is to get a few poems (two or three if I am lucky and the muse is in) from the "Expedition" series done. We'll see . . .

High Summer

This is the best time of year in the garden. I am just lovin' it.
Some pics to give you an idea:

Busy weekend so far. Went to Mother Courage last night at Youngstown Arts in Delridge. What an amazing play! The older woman who played Mother Courage was terrific. She just chewed up every scene. What great lines BB has written for her character. A cynic, a Cassandra, a pain in the butt, but you love her.

Worked Saturday clinic: saw 16 patients from 8:30-1:30. Not too busy. Our clinic is really the United Nations of Healthcare. I saw people from Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Somalia, Philippines, Mexico, Albania, and, of course, all variety of Americans. Babies, middle-age, teens, elderly, and in-between. Such fun. It is what I love most about my job.

Then went with Dean to a birthday party in Greenwood for my friend Leroy, who just turned 60. Leroy and I have been friends since I was a medical student at UW in the mid-80's. We met on the bus riding back and forth from UW to Capitol Hill. Good times.

Then Dean and I attended our neighbors Dana & Jim's wedding in the Bradner Gardens across the street. Such a lovely ceremony. So simple and so beautiful. With all the plants and flowers in bloom. Friends and neighbors. So hot! Almost 90 degrees I think. We all had little fans to shade our heads with. In the middle of the vows, a hummingbird lit on the bridal bouquet for a few seconds, hovered, tweeted twice, then flew away.

Need to get ready for Centrum. Looking forward to hanging out with other writers, and perhaps getting some work done on the "sonnet" sequence.

more later . . .