I love this poem from today's American Life in Poetry:

The Art of Being

The fern in the rain breathes the silver message.
Stay, lie low. Play your dark reeds
and relearn the beauty of absorption.
There is nothing beyond the rotten log
covered with leaves and needles.
Forget the light emerging with its golden wick.
Raise your face to the water-laden frond.
A thousand blossoms will fall into your arms.

 

 Anne Coray is an Alaskan, and in this beautiful meditation on the stillness of nature she shows us how closely she’s studied something that others might simply step over.

   American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Anne Coray from her most recent book of poetry, A Measure’s Hush, Boreal Books, 2011. Poem reprinted by permission of Anne Coray and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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Great little memorial article for Ruth Stone, written by Philip Levine, in the NY Times yesterday:

"Ruth lived in the only world of poetry that matters, the one without publishers, awards, prestige, competition, jealousy, money — the one  
we might call “poetry eternal,” the same world the great poems live in. Now she is there forever."

Geospatial Poetry Is Here!

Check out this terrific new collaborative poetry project. It is so cool to log on to Google Earth, and zoom in on a location (currently WA state is featured), and find a poem there! Some of the featured poets include Allen Braden, Kathleen Flenniken, Derrick Sheffield, Susan Rich, James Bertolino, and Kathryn Hunt. Visit Katharine Whitcomb's website for more details:

The Center for Geospatial Poetry at Central Washington University. A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology, edited by Professor Katharine Whitcomb, Dr. Robert Hickey, and Marco Thompson, is ready for readers and distribution. They are also now accepting submissions for a 2nd edition. Click on the above links and check it out.

Also: A Sense of Place has its first gig at the Cascadia Poetry Festival, March 25, 2012, 4 p.m. Be *there* (no pun intended).

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Love this poem from today's Verse Daily:
White Stork
                                         —Ciconia ciconia

Such jazzy arrhythmia,
                                     the white storks'
Plosive and gorgeous leave-takings suggest
Oracular utterance where the blurred
Danube disperses its silts.
                                         Then the red-
Billed, red-legged creatures begin to spiral,
To float among thermals like the souls, wrote
Pythagoras, praising the expansive
Grandeur of black-tipped wings, of dead poets.
Most Eastern cultures would not allow them
To be struck, not with slung stone or arrow
Or, later, lead bullet—
                                   birds who have learned,
While living, to keep their songs to themselves,
Who return to nests used for centuries,
Nests built on rooftops, haystacks, telegraph
Poles, on wooden wagon wheels placed on cold
Chimneys by peasants who hoped to draw down
Upon plague-struck villages such winged luck.

If the body in its failure remains
A nest, if the soul chooses to return...

Yet not one stork has been born in Britain
Since 1416, the last nest renounced
When Julian of Norwich, anchoress,
Having exhausted all revelations,
Took earthly dispensation, that final
Stork assuring, even while vanishing,
"Sin is behovely, but all shall be well."


Copyright © 2011 Michael Waters All rights reserved
from Gospel Night
BOA Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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And this one from a few days ago on Poem-A-Day

The Gardenia
by Cornelius Eady

The trouble is, you can never take
That flower from Billie's hair.
She is always walking too fast
and try as we might,

there's no talking her into slowing.
Don't go down into that basement,
we'd like to scream. What will it take
to bargain her blues,

To retire that term when it comes
to her? But the grain and the cigarettes,
the narcs and the fancy-dressed boys,
the sediment in her throat.

That's the soil those petals spring from,
Like a fist, if a fist could sing.

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Poetry Housewives of the University

This poetry kerfuffle has sure generated a lot of hype. I wonder if the publisher (Penguin) set it all up as a way to sell more copies of the anthology? Doesn't it all seem like a bad episode of reality TV? All this calling names and pulling hair and scratching over number of pages and who is in and who is out -- or am I just being cynical? You decide.

Poetry Knockdown: Harvard Prof Disses Poetry Anthology.

Where are those "millionaire job creators?"

Dean and I are back from a lovely week-plus in PV. So hard to come back to 30's and frost on the back porch, but it is good to be home. And, strangely enough, I really don't mind getting back to work, except that with call and admin duties I will be working the next 12 (yes twelve) days in a row. Yikes!

I had somewhat of a news holiday while out on the beach, except what was available on line (Thank god for HuffPo!). This particular article caught my eye. It really gets me going, those ignorant lying Republicans, and their BS about millionaire job creators:

"We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected . So NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.
So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to. A group called the Tax Relief Coalition said the problem was finding someone willing to talk about their personal taxes on national radio.
So next we put a query on Facebook. And several business owners who said they would be affected by the "millionaires surtax" responded."



-- Jody Gorran, chairman of Aquatherm Industries: "This mantra that every dollar in tax increases is a dollar away from job creation -- give me a break. ... It's not taxes that affects job creation, it's demand."
-- Kelly Conklin, owner of Foley-Waite Associates: "I don't decide to hire or buy equipment based on tax policy. ... We know how to make shit out of wood."
-- Debra Ruh, owner of TecAccess: "We need to hire people, but we don't have the cash or the credit to do it. ... I don't mind paying taxes. ... I like living in the United States and having the opportunities here. I don't understand why running a business has to be about avoiding paying taxes."
-- Michael Teahan, owner of Espresso Resource: "What we do in business, how we spend our money, how we allocate our resources -- that has very little to do with tax policy. ... I map my business based on my customers and what my customers want to buy and what they can afford to buy."
-- Rick Poore, owner of Designwear Inc.: "If you drive more people to my business, I will hire more people. It's as simple as that. If you give me a tax break, I'll just take the wife to the Bahamas."
-- Lew Prince, owner of Vintage Vinyl: "The economic premise that people won't hire because they might have to pay more taxes if they make more money is beyond laughable. ... You hire when you think there's a way you can make more money with that hire. The percentage the government takes out of it has almost nothing to do with it."

Cafe Nordo

Had a great time with Dean and friends at the finale performance of Cafe Nordo's "To Savor Tomorrow." We had never been to one of their dinner shows before, and it was quite a delight. The setting was retro-futuristic, on an airliner traveling from Hawaii to Seattle for the 1962 World's Fair. The plot was all cold-war era spying and espionage, with agents and double agents from US, USSR, China and Great Britain in search of a secret food weapon (a drunken twinkie?), with interludes from a food scientist recounting the history of food and new inventions in genetics and fertilizer that were leading us into a new, too-good-to-be-true era of convenience.

It was all really funny -- especially the silly spy thriller plot -- I LOVED Svetlana, the Soviet spy/stewardess, and Ping/Arthur, the Chinese/British double agent. But it was also thought provoking, in terms of getting us to think about where our food comes from, what all the "progress" in food science is leading too, etc -- I remember the scientist quoting "a man with bread has many problems, but a man with no bread has one problem;" and her malaprop about "American ingenue-ity."

Unfortunately the menu did not really live up to the press -- favorites were the blini with beet caviar, and the deconstructed won ton noodle soup; but the meat loaf dish was a bit of a let-down. Portions were small, and the presentation minimal, but maybe that was the intent -- this was the "food of tomorrow," for er . . . 1962. Still everybody seemed to be having a great time. The play was a hoot and the series of themed cocktails kept us loose and laughing.

Their next show is due this spring:

Coming Spring 2012: Café Nordo's Cabinet of Wonders
Enter a surreal gallery inspired by the Victorian Cabinets of Curiosity. Chef Nordo Lefesczki concocts a recipe that is one part museum, one part fun house, and one part five-course dinner. Explore the real and fantastic history, science, and mythology of food.
Opens May 5th, 2012 at Washington Hall (14th and Yesler). Don't miss out!

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In the NY Times Book Review today, a great essay-review of Daniel Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The reviewer, Jim Holt, talks about Kahneman's theory of the two parts of our brain: the quick, irrational, that uses association and metaphor; and the slow, calculating rational, that measures and counts and uses logic -- and how the irrational part is the one that calls the shots, often to our peril! (No wonder such a large part of the Republican base so often votes against their best interests!) Also, I was very intrigued by the concept of the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self," and how our awareness of our selves, our lives, our sense of happiness, and what we bases our decisions on, is primarily the work of the remembering self (vacations, and colonoscopies, are always better in retrospect). And that the experiencing self, in a large part, really hardly exists. Fascinating. I may actually have to get the book, and read about it all a little more in depth.


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I love this poem from today's American Life in Poetry:


Believe This

All morning, doing the hard, root-wrestling
work of turning a yard from the wild
to a gardener’s will, I heard a bird singing
from a hidden, though not distant, perch;
a song of swift, syncopated syllables sounding
like, Can you believe this, believe this, believe?
Can you believe this, believe this, believe?
And all morning, I did believe. All morning,
between break-even bouts with the unwanted,
I wanted to see that bird, and looked up so
I might later recognize it in a guide, and know
and call its name, but even more, I wanted
to join its church. For all morning, and many
a time in my life, I have wondered who, beyond
this plot I work, has called the order of being,
that givers of food are deemed lesser
than are the receivers. All morning,
muscling my will against that of the wild,
to claim a place in the bounty of earth,
seed, root, sun and rain, I offered my labor
as a kind of grace, and gave thanks even
for the aching in my body, which reached
beyond this work and this gift of struggle.

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American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2010 by Richard Levine, from his most recent book of poetry, That Country’s Soul, Finishing Line Press, 2010, by permission of Richard Levine and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD: POETRY announced. I heard the story on NPR this morning, and loved the exerpt from Nikky Finney's acceptance speech. Log on to the NBA site to read/hear interviews and video and such.

WINNER: Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split
(TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press) - Interview

FINALISTS:

Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) - Interview coming soon.

Carl Phillips, Double Shadow
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) - Interview

Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010
(W.W. Norton & Company) - Interview

Bruce Smith, Devotions
(University of Chicago Press) - Interview

Poetry Judges: Elizabeth Alexander (Panel Chair), Thomas Sayers Ellis,
Amy Gerstler, Kathleen Graber, Roberto Tejada

Wonderful essay/review of the work of Charles Wright (one of my faves), by Mark Jarman, up on PD -- check it out:

More than any other American poet writing today, perhaps more than any poet since Whitman and Dickinson, Charles Wright has recorded in his poems a lifetime of spiritual seeking. That pursuit has had more of Emily Dickinson's skepticism than Walt Whitman's affirmation, more of her struggles with Puritanism, than what Galway Kinnell once called Whitman's "mystical all lovingness." And yet the urge toward Whitman's embrace of multitude and the discretion of Dickinson's straitened thought have combined to create through Wright's genius an instrument which is to the spiritual life in contemporary poetry what the sonnet was for John Donne and George Herbert. Charles Wright has, for over forty years of mastery, given us a mode and a means for that journal of the soul which American poetry has, since Whitman and Dickinson, always had at heart. He has almost singlehandedly invented an American form of the devotional poem.

(originally appeared in Northwest Review)

Oh Erika: we're so glad you are OK!

Multiple rescue units were deployed Wednesday afternoon to rescue the passenger of a car that partially submerged in Lake Washington.

"I was coming down the street and I just lost control of the car," said Erika Goldstein. "And I kept going right into the water. And it was just like that."

And just like that, Goldstein, found herself in her VW Bug in Lake Washington.

Goldstein climbed out of the moon roof. You can see the doors wouldn't open and the windows wouldn't roll down, but luckily the sunroof was still working.

"I had to step on the steering wheel and you know, push myself out," said Goldstein.

Space Docking Poetry?

This is too sweet:

The first Chinese space docking today (Nov. 2) inspired not just national and scientific pride, but some romantic sentiment as well.

Several different Chinese newspapers and commentators have described the Tiangong 1 ("Heavenly Palace") and Shenzhou 8 ("Divine Vessel") spacecraft, which linked up in orbit today for the first time, as "lovers" making a "kiss in space," state newspaper Xinhua reported.

"Tiangong, my lover, for the arrival of this moment -- wait for me. I'm coming," reads a poem called "Lovers' Talk," published in Tianfu Zaobao, a Sichuan-based daily, according to Xinhua.

Art and Transformation

Dean and I went to the "Luminous" exhibit at SAM yesterday. What a great show! It was a selection of Seattle Art Museum's vast Asian Art collection, curated by Doh Ho Su (the artist who created the amazing "dog tag" suit of armor sculpture). It opens with a group of Buddha heads, from different cultures, such as Indonesian, Thai, Cambodian. Then a series of sculptural fragments, and the idea that everything is a fragment, only a piece of the whole, but that it also contains the essence of the whole. The pieces are grouped thematically, rather than chronologically, or by country -- and this serves to open up to larger ideas of the meaning of art, museums, memory, preservation. Suh writes a thoughtful brief intro to each group, that is just the right amount of a prompt.

The most amazing part was Suh's installation called Gate. It is a screen in the shape of the gate at his ancestral home in Korea, onto which a series of video images plays: his Korean home in the changing light (time lapse video); some growing tree branches like paint strokes; butterflies, dragonflies, a deer; and then an amazing series of crows, single and flocking and filling the sky, and swarming into a whirl -- all echoing images that are to come in the next rooms. It is a pretty amazing piece, visually and viscerally moving, and it's worth it to sit in the dark anteroom and watch it for a while, before passing through the gate, and experiencing the transformation that great art offers. And then looking back, and seeing it again from the other side.

Highly recommended.


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I love this poem from the new Jim Harrison book from Copper Canyon.


River II


Another dawn in the village by the river
and I'm jealous of the 63 moons of Jupiter.
Out in the yard inspecting a lush lilac bush
followed by five dogs who have chosen
me as their temporary leader. I look up
through the vodka jangle of the night before,
straight up at least 30,000 feet where the mountains
are tipping over on me. Dizzy I grab the lilacs
for support. Of course it's deceitful clouds
playing the game of becoming mountains.
Once on our nighttime farm on a moonlit walk
the clouds pushed by a big western wind
became a school of whales swimming hard
across the cold heavens and I finally knew
that we walk the bottom of an ocean we call sky.


-- Jim Harrison, from Songs of Unreason

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999 = 666 ?

From Conservative Focus

By Paul Bentley

Michele Bachmann ridiculed Cain's plan most successfully, saying that when scrutinised or 'turned upside down' the 999 principle became Satan's number, 666.

'When you take the 999 plan and you turn it upside down, I think the devil is in the details,' she said.

She added that the proposal was not a jobs plan, but rather a tax plan.

The planned 999 policy has come in for criticism before from tax analysts, who claim it would cause those less well off to pay more.


Jon Huntsman, meanwhile, joked that at first he thought the 999 tax plan was a pizza price, not a real economic proposal.


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HAHAHA. The republican debate was such a hoot to watch. Are these people for real? Invoking the Anti Christ and 666 as debate points? It is looking better for Obama every day.

A lovely poem from today's American Life in Poetry:

October

I used to think the land
had something to say to us,
back when wildflowers
would come right up to your hand
as if they were tame.

Sooner or later, I thought,
the wind would begin to make sense
if I listened hard
and took notes religiously.
That was spring.

Now I’m not so sure:
the cloudless sky has a flat affect
and the fields plowed down after harvest
seem so expressionless,
keeping their own counsel.

This afternoon, nut tree leaves
blow across them
as if autumn had written us a long letter,
changed its mind,
and tore it into little scraps.


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Poem copyright ©2010 by Don Thompson, whose most recent book of poetry is Where We Live, Parallel Press, 2009.

WCW Article

FOR MANY years, Rutherford native William Carlos Williams practiced medicine and wrote poetry. It is hard to say how much one may have influenced the other, but the historical record, at least as it speaks to us in the written word, shows that it was a productive collaboration.

Fittingly, Williams' vast talents are being recognized next year, with nine other American poets, in a postage stamp collection being issued by the United States Postal Service. We can think of no more deserving recipient.

For Williams, who in his role as physician must have observed so much about the daily struggles of life and death in North Jersey, penned a uniquely American form of poetry. In essence, Williams wrote what he saw, and he saw plenty. He saw poetry in the everyday: the subtle possibilities of a red wheelbarrow in the rain, the not-so-subtle seductions of Queen Anne's lace.

Of course, Williams, also an essayist and prolific letter writer, is best known for his epic poem, "Paterson," which appeared in five separate volumes from 1946 to 1958. In 1963, the year he died, Williams' collection "Pictures From Brueghel" won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Now, nearly 50 years after his death comes this new honor, being part of a postage stamp memoriam to be released next March. The photograph of Williams used in the collection was taken in the 1940s. Other poets honored include Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath.

Thanks must go to photographer and historian William Neumann of Rutherford, a longtime Williams admirer, who nominated the poet for the stamp and gathered support from local legislators and literary groups. "He spoke to people directly through his poetry, and he was a tremendous letter writer, so I thought it was appropriate," Neumann told The Record.

As far as New Jersey is concerned, Williams might be fairly seen as that creative bridge between the original American poet, Walt Whitman, and the counterculture genius, Allen Ginsberg. Williams' poetry was informed by the gritty, diverse and working class people and landscapes of Paterson and beyond. Its themes are universal, its origins undeniably American.