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Wednesday, December 31, 2003

an international blog. how exciting! this will be fairly short, since I'm on Roger's mother's computer down here in Trinidad, and I type faster than the words appear on the screen, and can make a snack in the time it takes an email to send.

so much to tell, but suffice to say (a) it's a miracle we're here at all, given that we found out at 9 a.m. that our flight left JFK at 10:30 a.m., and Roger hadn't yet begun to pack, and (b) never enter the tropics without insect repellant and stomach medicine. I got over the nausea after the first couple of days, but the mosquito bites are going to drive me mad.

the first night out with hordes of QRC boys (Roger's high school classmates) lasted until 5 a.m. -- and around 3 a.m. I noticed on the bar's TV that CNN was reporting what looked with the sound off to be a massive earthquake in LA. I was panicked, of course, and couldn't call anyone to see what had happened until the next day. so I just had to drink more Stag -- "the beer for men" -- to calm down.

we spent Christmas Eve day on the beach, which was highly surreal for me -- sunburn for Christmas? what?

more stories to come, and photos when we get back. right now I have to go find the anti-itch cream before I lose a layer of skin.

Friday, December 19, 2003

sigh. this is an actual response I received to posting information about the AFA poll to a poetry listserv:

Marty:

Two points I'd like to mention.

One. Gay marriage is not an issue of special concern to poets. Your logic in sending this message to "Poets All Over" is suspect.

Two. Your call to "unskew the poll" seems to imply that you assume the readers of this list will vote in favor of permitting gay marriage. I have never understood why so many people simply assume that poets, as a group, can be counted on to be social liberals and to blindly line up behind the opponents of traditional values.

Many poets are not social liberals -- myself, for example -- and do not support gay marriage. In fact, I understand that traditional marriage, a man with a woman, is the irreducible basis of any healthy culture and that it deserves special protection under the law. Homosexual narriage, on the other hand, really does threaten this most valuable of institutions. I do know that a lot of stupid people go around spouting hateful opinions on this and similar issues, but, at the same time, traditional marriage really is so important that even reasonable people must agree to protect it.

Thank you for bringing the AFA survey to my attention. I will go directly to their Web site and vote to prevent legalized homesexual unions.

Best regards,

(I've omitted his name).

triple sigh.

on another note, I'm out of the country for the next two weeks, so try not to miss my babbling too much. go read a book, dammit! and tell me how it was.

love & more love,

M.

oh, and in case you're interested, here's what I responded:

Dear Jxxxx:

You are absolutely correct, on several points.

One, I applaud your initiative in voting your
conscience. I believe that we each need to do so.

Two, I do assume, and apparently mistakenly so, that
poets have the intellectual capacity and
open-mindedness to undertand that two human beings who
love one another should have the legal right to join
in union that allows them equal rights (shared
healthcare, hospital visitation, child custody, among
myriad others) as "traditional" married couples.

I would be absolutely fascinated to know how you and
the other poets of whom you speak believe that
homosexual marriages threatens a healthy culture. As a
member of a non-traditional (heterosexual,
inter-racial) couple, I'm interested to know whether
my relationship also threatens said culture.

Unfortunately, I'm leaving the country for the next
two weeks, so I may be slow in responding to any
reply. Trust that it is due to no lack of interest.

yours in progress,

Marty.

*****

There is so much left unsaid and so much poorly said in my response, but I have a flight to catch in a matter of hours, so that will have to do. be good, be safe, come to Bar 13 January 5 if you can.

Thursday, December 18, 2003

my dear daphne gottlieb, who is always at least three steps ahead of me, sends this depressing information -- the AFA is removing pro-marriage votes as fast as they come in:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/griffen/667656.html

however, we can continue to make it difficult for them, and we should.

The American Family Association has decided to try to prove a point by having a poll on their website for folks to take about their opinion on gay marriage. They intend to present the results of this poll to the United States Congress in an attempt to instate a federal law against gay marriage. The only folks who were even made aware of its existence were the people on the AFA mailing list and the people who happened to wander across their website. They have absolutely every intention of presenting this poll in the form of a petition to congress against gay marriage. I wonder if they'll still present it when the YAYs outweigh the NAYs?

It's obvious that they think that this poll will come out in their favor, and that the vast majority of people will vote to keep marriage for traditional couples only.

Please visit:
http://www.afa.net/petitions/marriagepoll.asp and let your opinion be heard. It takes about 45 seconds, and it is SUCH an important topic.

PLEASE make your voice heard.

Please feel free to pass this on to others.

yay! they chose my ending. and then it was the pre-holiday party so I am several apple martinis deep -- alcohol is the divel -- devil. how interesting, what's a divel. divel

\Di*vel"\, v. t. [L. divellere; dit- = dis- + vellere to pluck.] To rend apart. [Obs.] --Sir T. Browne.

hm. not that interesting. obscure, even by definition.

in any case, my ending worked. yay. I feel vastly better about the show. is that wrong? by the way, my ending was #2. yay dad! that's the one you voted for. none of the rest of you gave me any feedback in time. sigh.

by the way, Stephen Dunn's book Landscape at the End of the Century ends with a 14-PAGE POEM that destroys and rebuilds your world while you're reading it. OH MY GOD. read it. anaphora, cycle, energy, all things here. and beyond.

"I love that tyrants give birth
to the knives that slit their throats.
And I love the vigilant
who try to keep the tyrants dead,
knowing they rise with different names."

"How good it's been to slide back
the heart's hood awhile, how fortunate
there's a heart and a covering for it,
and that whatever is still warm
has a chance."

and on and on...

love to all and time for sleep.

M.

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

I so need to be sleeping right now, but I made the mistake of reworking the ending of the show and emailing it to everyone. Why was this a mistake? Because I love the new ending. And the old one is fine, but now by contrast... well, I'm not going to be as content to do it as I was when I didn't have an alternative in mind.

sigh. this whole collaborative process thing is overrated. OK, off to think positive thoughts about everyone loving the new alternative ending. and try to sleep. more tomorrow, maybe.

should I post the options here? sure, why not. I'm unconvinced anyone aside from my father is reading this anyway. Hi Dad.

so of course, you know nothing of what comes before this, nor do you know who'll be saying what. which may or may not matter. in any case:

option 1:

Because the promise of America is unfulfilled
Until it is realized we will
not accept silence
must not get weak
It is an act of revolution to speak.

Involvement is as necessary as breathing

And I cannot write a poem to tell you to breathe.
Not if I tried to.
Let someone else tell you how to live
I’ll tell you why to.
I’ll talk with passion about beauty and love
But there is a limit to the things I’ll speak of
no matter how important
What will never get written
What you will not catch me
ever on the street corner spittin
What I am taking for granted like air in my throat
Like you just know to breathe is how you just know to vote
and I will not / write a poem / to say
breathe.

option 2:

Because the promise of America is unfulfilled
Until it is realized we will
not accept silence
must not get weak
It is an act of revolution to speak.

voting is as necessary as breathing.

listen: we are power. we are the sweet
and beating heart of a nation built on a flawed love poem to freedom

we are a tulip growing in the splash of a storm drain
we are sunlight refracted through a beer bottle
we are beautiful

we are boycott and passage and insurrection and congregation
we are the movement behind the leaders

our very existence is poetic
our actions outlive our flesh
we are immortal

we are kinetic energy,
the potential for change pulsing
in your wrists where you sit and when you touch
the stranger, the lover, the friend to your left, realize
we are electric. we are current. we are fire
ready to rise.

***

thoughts, ideas, comments welcome as always...

Monday, December 15, 2003

so I just returned from the Los Feliz Poetry Slam -- Dufflyn asked me to do the "set slam" -- a popular format out here in LA where several poets compete with 10-12 minute poetry sets. She encouraged us to use costumes, props, music, etc., but of course I have no such resources out here so it was a regular old set for me. A little politicked out and certainly not in the mood for a capital-S slam set, I opted for 10 minutes of strange little love poems -- figuring what the hell, all the winner gets is qualification for a semi-finals I won't be here to attend, I might as well do what I'm feeling.

And I won, with this thoroughly enjoyable and low-key set up against Omari's intensity and Eitan's theatricality (including a stripper routine that got him down to red-white-and-blue thong thing. terrifying. I couldn't get up the courage to take a picture.)

A surprise all around. And this guy at the bar afterward tells me, "I don't know much about poetry. But it was like, you used your words differently from those guys. Like there was something else going on." Affirmation! Reassurance! And I wasn't funny at all. Not one line. Yay.

And FYI to all: you know how in New York, if you buy two drinks and tip decently, the bartender will almost always buy your third drink if it's a slow night or slow bar? That doesn't happen in LA. The bartender took my only mostly-empty wine glass and didn't replace it. And I didn't even really want another drink, it was just... odd.

Tomorrow we read the entire 20-minute Declare Yourself show at a theater, for a crowd (assuming people show up.) Here goes nothing, as they say. I don't know what that means, here goes nothing. Whatever. I have strayed so far from the original purpose of this journal, it's almost unbelievable. It's also very cold in LA. That's one thing I didn't mention about the show, it was semi-outdoors and freezing. One heat lamp thing and Rachel and I kept going to stand under it but it was right by the stage so when someone awful went up to slam we had to go stand in the cold back because it was almost as though we too were on stage, and I at least am not that good an actress. I'm told it's not usually this cold here. I am exceedingly chumped by this weather. and unprepared.

someone told me that the wind gets very still right before an earthquake, so when the wind which is right now really crazy stops, I get worried. my skin is also very very dry. something about LA is exceptionally drying. people always have chapstick. I've gone through several bottles of lotion already. madness, all around.

well, this was scintillating. see, this is what happens when it's 3:30 a.m. where anyone who might listen to me babble is. ugh, and my sentence construction skills have gone to hell. double sigh.

Saturday, December 13, 2003

So I don't have much time, but an update's in order: after an exhausting week of crazy little sleep and much much discussion, we are close close close to having a completed script. And I think it works. I think it's effective and nonpartisan and addresses issues with balance -- I think.

In any case, it's close. Whether it's poetry or not is not a conversation I'm capable of having right now.

BUT with the approval of my writing partner, I'm culling the orphan poems out of the rubble of the scripting process and starting the new book. The working title that came to mind was "strange fire" but 30 seconds of research shows that to be the name of an early Indigo Girls album -- not that there's anything wrong with that, but I usually prefer my allusions and outright thieveries to be more obscure than that. Anyway, the sections at this early early stage look to be:

section 1: chasing the rabbit (the search for connection)
section 2: equality takes to the road (story poem series personifying the Big Vague qualities -- equality, liberty, truth, etc.)
section 3: hero

personifying the big vague qualities, you say? what the hell is that about? let me explain. no, let me sum up (Princess Bride allusion, get it. Norman Lear. Anyway...)

one of my Big Bright Ideas for the show was for each of us to choose a quality or two to personify -- for example, the one I'm pasting here personifies equality:

sick of faking it

equality takes to the road with a bandanna
tied to a stick, hitchiking her way
to a small town in Texas
where she can sip tequila in a bar
anonymously

the trucker says she looks kinda
familiar, like he's seen her someplace
before. equality nudges the dark glasses closer
to her face, mumbles I've been around,
don't think we've ever met though


equality's in a truck halfway through Arkansas
before anybody misses her, starts looking around
at the base of drinking fountains
and in bathroom stalls

pretty soon things start falling apart. with equality
soaking up the sun by a motel pool in Texarkana,
growing alarmingly dark, justice
works overtime trying to take up the slack,
happiness picks up an extra shift

scientists scramble to clone equality
from the hair in her drain, find the DNA
doesn't match -- which explains
a lot – a grand jury investigation
finds authentic equality bones buried
in modern-day Georgia
with indian remains dating back
to the 1700s. marks on the skull hint at foul play,
but the report is misfiled by a white house aide
and never released.

equality takes up work as a cocktail waitress
just outside Waco. learns to cuss in Spanish
from the busboys who comment behind her back
at the strange metallic nature of her laugh.

*****

so basically justice, equality, etc. all pack up and take off for parts unknown, and the story goes from there.

inspiration: Stephen Dobyns' "Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides" as well as Roger's "Truth was born in India" poem.

Dobyns does metaphor like nobody does metaphor, in my humble opinion. Have you read "white pig?" OH MY GOD. run, do not walk, to: http://www.contemporarypoetry.com/dialect/poetry/dobynswhitepig.html

I also stole from this book the habit of titling poems by pulling strange phrases out of juxtaposed lines or phrases.

Back to my point: in "Pallbearers," Dobyns chooses a hero, this Heart character, who is at once an actual organ heart and a human thing wandering around in search of... self? fulfillment? something highly human, in any case. And it resolves the need (my need) to leave the first person for a bit, to have a hero, a main character -- but the fact that this main character is also something other than human makes everything function on more than one level.

Example:

The Dark and Turbulent Sea
by Stephen Dobyns

Sailboat, sailboat - so Heart counts the ships at sea
in order to raise his thoughts above matters of flesh.
Heart is at the beach in his red swimsuit and nearby
on towels or tossing balls in the air are abundant
examples of female dazzle. Often Heart is comforted
by the waves' regulation, the distant line of watery
horizon, and the air with its mixed aspects of seafood,
salt and sweat. But here at the beach Heart is no closer
to the sea's soothing sway and resultant philosophical
reflection than on a city street. Lolling and frolicking
nymphs, pink flesh, and half-bared breasts, consume
his vision and so in desperation Heart counts the ships
at sea - sailboat, sailboat - in hopes he'll be restored
to calm. This for Heart enacts life's essential problem-
the distant vista with its philiosophical paraphernalia
is disturbingly hidden by the delights of the foreground.
Why for instance, mull over mortality when a bevy
of young ladies is engaged in a bosomy bout of volleyball
just a few feet away. Jiggle, jiggle thinks Heart, it leads
to trouble. Sad to say, he hasn't thought of Kierkegaard
all day. Heart is even hesitant to swim or take a nap lest
he miss some beauty adjust a strap or hitch her halter up.
As for the dark and violent sea it's just a distraction, easily
ignored; moral issues, highbrow notions - all forgotten.
This is in answer to a question asked the next day by a man
in his car starting through his tempest-streaked windshield
at the wind pummeled beach: Why's that guy sitting there
grinning? Heart's having a picnic, even though it's storming.
Raindrops run down his neck. Heart stares at the waves disappearing
into the fog and feels able at last to see what's there in peace. And what's that?:
What lies ahead and what always has been. All the immutable whys and wherefores.
But now Heart's distracted once again. Beneath the sand he has found a
polka dotted bikini top. What amazing luck! Heart presses it to his lips,
then folds it neatly in his basket. Is he aware of the wintry weather's
fierce attack? Guess not.

*****

This is far from my favorite poem from the book, but I don't have the book here because I'm in Los Angeles and everything I love is in NY. That of course is an overstatement, but certainly the great majority of my books are there, including this one.

In any case, you can see from this that if you substitute just a person, just He, it loses a great deal of its oomph as a poem ($40,000 in debt for grad school, and I'm still saying oomph. sigh.)

And imagine (if you've not read the book yet) already being engaged with Heart, knowing some things about Heart and his trials and desires.

Anyway, my hope is to take it in another direction and use a set of such characters. It may dissolve into irreparable hokiness, in which case I'll regret posting this and go in another direction altogether. But it just might keep me sane for a while. And isn't that the bulk of the point anyway.

Thursday, December 11, 2003

So I should be sleeping right now, but I'm in this strange space where I'm exhausted and yet not sleepy.

We worked on the script for the show until 2 a.m. yesterday, to hear today at read-through that it's close but not quite there -- in fact, not really even close. Oh, the pieces all exist, for the most part (they better, after three solid weeks of writing for a damn 20-minute show), but we're too heavy, too serious, not enough lightness, not enough joy.

and the instincts of the powers that be always lead them to work by the guys, which is starting to make me want to throw myself out a window. it's so strange, the pull between the very natural and human desire to Succeed, to Please, to be the one of whom the boss says "that's it! yes, absolutely!" and the years of pushing and pushing to be different, experimental, authentic -- and the two aren't mutually exclusive, necessarily, not all the time, but yes, much of the time they are. or they seem so.

what on earth am I doing here? it makes almost no sense that I'm on this project. it's not even about getting certain issues into the show anymore -- there's no time to go into analysis or complexity, and the crowd's going to be STANDING -- not even sitting -- so it's more about feeling that I have a place in this show, that something even sounds like me.

part of me -- a big part -- just wants to get the damn thing written so I can leave the country for two weeks. which will happen. part of me just wants to quit, come home, go totally academic, pretend the slam thing and the def jam thing and all that never happened, go esoteric and wear long corduroy skirts and nubby wool cardigans and hang out only with people who aren't surprised at my regular use of the word "caveat." which won't happen. I think that I am hard-wired against quitting. and then there's that whole contract thing.

ugh. I'm just whiny now, and homesick like a college freshman. yes, it's fantastic that the job is poetry -- but (a) it's a strange thing when your love is your job, and (b) at this point it's not about the poetry. it's not writing and trying to get published or writing and trying to perform -- it's about putting together 18-20 minutes of material from four different poets, honor their voices, remain nonpartisan, deliver messages, effect change, grab the attention of random college students crossing a quad -- oh, and try not to lose your soul in the process.

lovely -- from whiny to melodramatic. that's a sign it's time for bed.

here's a new poem that has nothing to do with the show, but I did write it out here. sigh. I don't like the title so much -- suggestions are welcome!

proof

the lie is that we are all the same
which is different from the lie that we are separate

which we are, and aren't -- I'm not explaining this
very well. clearly I am not you or these words

would be different words, another indication
that we are entirely distinct beings, not even

separated at birth but strangers, though you
with hands and I with hands, both with these

opposable thumbs, that critical moment
in our collective evolution -- I, for example,

dislocated my right thumb running drunk
across a college campus during homecoming

and smacking into a tree branch. you
have done no such thing. would know better

than to head full-tilt toward the dorm, no matter
how badly you had to pee, would know

not to turn your head on the dark path when the friend
racing to follow calls your name, leading you straight

into a low tree-branch, ear-first, falling of course
to the ground and catching your full weight

on a thumb not intended to take it. but you
might have been the ER nurse who studied it and

without warning, popped it back into place. or not.
but here's the thing: you could have been. as I was starting

this story, you could have frowned, remembering your brief
stint in the emergency room of McCullough-Hyde Hospital

in Oxford, Ohio, the hospital the local college kids call
Kill-'Em-and-Hide-'Em, how many dislocated joints

you relocated there, how homecoming was the worst,
all the recent grads trying to recapture their glory days

at Hole in the Wall or Mac & Joe's -- or not. that
would be a stretch, a coincidence at least, if not

a miracle. a small one, to be sure, but what luck
to find you here just as faith was disintegrating -- what luck

to fall in love at all --

Monday, December 08, 2003

*sigh*

my cousin Pete is at Ft. Bragg right now, preparing to head to Afghanistan. West Point grad, reservist, father to 3-yr-old Shane -- of course he got called up.

more later. read on.

U.S. Strike Mistakenly Kills Nine Children
Residents of Afghan Village Say Terrorist Suspect
Still Alive
By AIJAZ RAHI, AP

Hats and shoes littered a blood-stained field in this
desolate Afghan village Sunday, a day after U.S.
warplanes - targeting a terror suspect - mistakenly
killed nine children.

Clothes of the nine children killed in a U.S.
airstrike were placed on their graves Sunday in
eastern Afghanistan.

American officials offered their regrets Sunday and
said they were ''deeply saddened'' by the deaths. The
United Nations called for an investigation. And the
Afghan government urged the U.S.-led coalition hunting
Taliban and al-Qaida fighters to make sure such an
accident is never repeated.

In Hutala on Sunday, a line of fresh graves marked the
tragedy, and village men stood quietly by a stream in
a dusty field where the children had been playing.
They seemed as bewildered as they were angry.

''First they fire their rockets. Then they say it was
a mistake,'' Haji Amir Mohammed told The Associated
Press, as dozens of American soldiers sent to
investigate the incident offered condolences or lay in
the warming winter sun. ''How can we forgive them?''

Villagers said the young victims had been playing with
marbles in a dusty field beside mud homes in this
impoverished valley, some 150 miles southwest of
Kabul, when the A-10 ground attack aircraft homed in.

Military officials said Sunday they had no idea
children were in the area when they decided to attack.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the suspect
targeted and killed was a former Taliban commander
named Mullah Wazir, adding that he was ''deeply
saddened'' by the ''tragic loss of innocent life.''

Khalilzad said the former commander ''had bragged of
his personal involvement in attacks on innocent Afghan
citizens,'' including aid groups and Afghans working
on the Kabul-Kandahar road, a site of frequent
violence.

Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a spokesman for the
coalition, told the AP in Hutala that it had appeared
to the pilot of the aircraft that ''just that person
that we wanted, that terrorist, was in the field. So
we fired on him.''

Troops discovered the children's bodies after rushing
to the scene to verify that they had got Wazir. U.S.
officers flew in Sunday to apologize to village
elders, Hilferty said.

But residents were adamant that the military had acted
on bogus intelligence. Many said the man killed was
not Wazir, and that the former district commander
under the Taliban had left the village some days
before the attack.

''There are no terrorists, no Taliban or al-Qaida
here,'' said Abdul Majid Farooqi. ''Just poor
people.''

The 11,500 U.S.-led troops hunting Taliban and
al-Qaida remnants in south and east Afghanistan often
are supported by air power, and there have been a
string of military mishaps.

The worst occurred in July 2002, when Afghan officials
said 48 civilians at a wedding party were killed and
117 wounded by a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship in
Uruzgan province, which borders Ghazni province.

On April 9, a U.S. warplane mistakenly bombed a home
in the eastern town of Shkin, killing 11 civilians.
Another air strike in Nuristan province in eastern
Afghanistan on Oct. 31 reportedly killed at least
eight civilians in a house.

''This incident, which follows similar incidents, adds
to a sense of insecurity and fear in the country,''
Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. Special Representative to
Afghanistan, said in Kabul.

The Afghan government said it fully supported fighting
terrorism but urged the U.S.-led coalition to ''be
very careful not to repeat such tragedies.''

Also Sunday, officials said two Turkish engineers and
an Afghan had been kidnapped along the road being
build between the capital, Kabul and the city of
Kandahar, bringing to five the number of workers
abducted in Afghanistan in the last three days.

Taliban attacks have plagued the flagship road
construction project. Four workers were killed in
August, and de-mining operations along the road were
suspended last month after a carjacking. A Turkish
engineer was abducted along the road Oct. 30 and
released after one month.

The Taliban, whose hard-line Islamic regime was ousted
from power in a U.S.-led offensive in late 2001, have
stepped up attacks in recent months, targeting foreign
aid workers and perceived allies of the coalition.

International aid agencies have reduced operations in
Afghanistan's south and east due to escalating
violence, including the Nov. 16 drive-by shooting
death of a French U.N. aid worker.


12-07-03 17:32 EST

Saturday, December 06, 2003

NYC is snowed in. It's 60 degrees here in LA. From the relative balminess of this coast, I suppose I don't get to say how much I wish I were there, in NYC, curled up in a warm apartment (leaking radiator and all), watching the season -- I haven't been able to write this missing, this sense of knowing that I am in the wrong place for all the right reasons. Los Angeles seems void of metaphors, though I know it must be full of them --

Only the abstract makes sense today, which doesn't bode well for the writing I'm SUPPOSED to do this afternoon. What makes sense is broken, cobbled together with memorywires and odd moments and missing, missing, missing --

Essay: The Infinite Assonances Within
by Eleni Sikelianos

The New York phone book is suggestive of a sublime
genius, beyond human origin, a domesticated list
of names drawn in much
as an evil spirit will be drawn & contained within
a small, blue safety bottle. Here are heroes and djinns. We are drawn
not to its contents but to its mystery. It should be microminiaturized
by hand & worn
on a chain around the neck, an Ifrit in a cucurbit, to touch upon
delicate, upon agile & dexterous,
a light field ergonomically created at night, a theory
of the means of the process of the toucher who touches upon
names, a field lightly. The names
escape in a black cloud of naming. And if it were graven
in the eye corners it were a warner
to those who would be warned
at that corner or this:
when the index has power enough
to weigh down atomic factors, the tactile corpuscles take
advantage when the touching is touching
upon a field restrained within the adjacent names which harness
the possibilities of flesh and spirit properties, anatomophysiological practicalities
of famous violin players’ brains; what is contained
within the touching finger? the little pinky
is not irrelevant, nothing
is. The sum of names does not point to the souls of this city
or to the distance between bodies but
rhymes, hence, hey, everybody is
those that touch
the ones they're touching & she who touches
upon a thing dark or light might read us thus
what is happening anywhere, what has happened, and what will

Friday, December 05, 2003

So OK -- apologies for the inexcusable delay in updates. However, in the interim I have moved temporarily to Los Angeles, started work on a crazy new project (see www.DeclareYourself.com) that requires a different take on the whole writing process, re-organized my manuscript, gotten an acceptance from Prairie Schooner (insert incredible excitement here), and started developing the idea for the next book.

So -- there will be a slight shift in focus for the journal as I expand (sorry, sorry, all poetry die-hards I'd promised a poetry-only journal) to include some random observations on life in Los Angeles and then on the road. I will, of course, include as much poetry as possible.

I also made a little web site -- www.geocities.com/martyoutloud -- so I can post pictures and stuff (thanks to the early Christmas present of a digital camera from mom & dad) as well as post show dates etc.

I think this officially brings me into the end of the last century's technology, because all the cool tech kids have their journal, pictures, etc. ad nauseum on the same site. Well, whatever. I'm OK with that.

So in my hands I have "Landscape at the End of the Century" by Stephen Dunn. Oh Stephen, Stephen, you make me wish I were a real poet.

I've been working and thinking and twisting my brain around politics and poetry for years -- but this Declare Yourself project has required me to write more specifically about capital-P politics than ever -- and with an emphasis on the accessible end of the poetic spectrum.

So of course about half of what I've written is actually even within the realm of possibility for use in the show, and the rest has inspired me to think that perhaps the next book of poems will be political in nature, but as abstract and experimental and wierd as I want to be.

It just might work.

And all this supported by Stephen Dunn's fantastic work that manages at once to be overtly political and never didactic, always suprising -- much like Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser (though MR has her speechy moments), etc.

So here's one poem I think may set the tone for a section of the book -- I'm considering undertaking a series of "hero" poems, talking to or about or in some way addressing or dissecting various heroes, expected and unexpected.

*

day in the life

the hero folds. more
than half-mortal, just sinew and gut
like everyone / not fair
he says, the cult of expectation
raging the streets, torches
in hand / not fair. the rubble
of pedestal around his feet
surges, grabs hold, he quiets, waits.

*

the hero's mother is a virgin.
the hero's mother is royalty.
the hero's mother is not his mother.
the hero's mother is a servant.
the hero's father is the king.
the hero's father is a god.
the hero's father is God.
the hero's father is a mystery.

the hero is raised far from his country.
the hero survives an attempt on his life.
the hero is mocked by other children.
the hero is patient.
the hero is quiet.
the hero is confused with someone else.

the hero travels far.
the hero visits the underworld.
the hero visits strange and dangerous places.
temptation taunts the hero.
doubt plagues the hero.
the hero fails.
the hero is at best only partly successful.
the hero succeeds.

the hero returns home.
the hero is perfect.
the hero has a tragic flaw.
the hero dies.
the hero lives forever.

*

Santa Claus is neither hero nor saint. why
start our children out believing
such an obvious lie?
our first belief in the invisible
and beneficent, inevitably disproved --
doesn't bode well for gods
or politicians behind closed doors

*

the hero curses his gift.
the hero has a dark and hidden past.
the hero came from nowhere.
the hero came from a small town in the midwest.
the hero was born in a log cabin in Kentucky.
the hero can't remember.

*

hail hero, full of grace, hail
psychic, priest, fortunecookie, horoscope – absolve us
from responsibility, lift this burden of action

*

the hero takes a nap.
the hero has irregular bowel movements.
the hero cannot have children.
the hero makes an excellent lemon meringue pie.

*

the crowd is at the door, torches in hand. the hero
has been found out. the crowd believed in the hero.
the crowd listened when the hero spoke, ate
what the hero recommended, marched
when the hero said march and when
there was time and it wasn't raining. the crowd
expresses its disappointment in the hero.
the crowd knows it expects too much and doesn't care.
the crowd swears it will never go through this again.

*

the hero calls his mother.
the hero skims the Bible.
the hero checks his horoscope.
the hero checks the locks.

praise the hero and his broken tongue.
praise the soiled dishes in the hero's sink.
praise the sputtering torches and the calls that say come home.
praise the headline smoldering on the hero's porch.
praise the cockroach scuttering across the hero's floor
looking up at the body and moving on.

*

comments welcome! I don't think you can post them to me in any way here, but send them to Marty@louderARTS.com.

Or visit my dippy web site at www.geocities.com/martyoutloud and leave me a message on my guest book!

off to another LA reading -- wish me luck.