Myth of Arrival

Let this be a new "Introduction," as you might have noticed, things have changed. A bit of blog body modification. The source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, says this of "mutilation" and "Extreme" body modification:

Body modification (or body alteration) is the permanent or semi-permanent deliberate altering of the human body for non-medical reasons, such as spiritual, various social (markings) or aesthetic. It can range from the socially acceptable decoration (e.g., pierced ears in many societies), over religiously mandated (e.g., circumcision in a number of cultures) to corporal punishment and provocative statement by the rebellious (e.g., nostril piercings in punk subculture), some even get physically addicted to the kick of a painful procedure.

Some even get physically addicted … How true! Just like that twenty-second ear ring, once I began fumbling about with formats and colors on my blog, there was no stopping¹. I never would have imagined, however, how difficult choosing functional colors can be. I guess I am not as much of a fan of "Atomic Vomit" Green and "Little Mermaid Kelp" Blue as I thought. Odd.

This leads us to Today's Question: Do you get points for sending me a letter with all the letters there, just not in the right order? Friends of Cooley Gardens (one of the few public gardens in Lansing) wrote to me asking for money, a letter to "Azchary." The 1995 Poet's Market² (under heading: Red Cedar Review editor) spelled it "Jachary." But that is better than what one of my residents called me two nights ago: "Hey, poop boy!" Poetry and fecal matter; covering all the grounds.

I didn't post this yesterday, partly because I ran out of time before I had to flee to work and partly because I find multiple posting on the same day hideously lugubrious³. However, it has come to my attention I need to submit another poem for publication. Today it is GUIDANCE TO THE WÜNDERKIND and the magazine of choice is The Madison Review. The poem in question is neither a sonnet or villanelle, but in wonderful free verse! Yes, there was a time (was it ten years ago already?) when I was writing long, rambling odes to drag queens that looked a little like this (but with better line breaks):

… the streets are long - we

hurry from lit pool to
lit pool - someone has
scrawled Purgatory in
crayon on the pavement
at our feet …

1. Actually, it was Shelby who did all the work. I just sat by her watching. Also, there was no fumbling at all, nosireebob, she knew exactly which key to hit [back]
2. At a steal! Only $2.95 + plus shipping. [back]
3. Not because I know the really meaning of "lugubrious" but because it is such a fun word to say: lugubrious, lugubrious, lugubrious. Eat your heart out Robert Hass. [back]

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.

- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"

(probably braining in some poor S.O.B. passing by Henry's window … you know how grum poets can be, especially anyone forced to live in New England)

I know Lansing isn't the poetry meccca Agana, Guam¹ or Underwood, North Dakota is, but next week we will actually be having two (2) poetry events in one (1) week. Not just the Dead Poets reading² but Tim Lane reminds us:

Magdalena Teahouse Open Mic Poetry Reading Series
Tuesday, Oct. 25
sign up 7:45

You should go to that if you happen to be in Lansing. You can go as a Dead Poet. A Dead Poet! Ruelaine writes: "To date, the list of Dead Poets scheduled to appear at the Creole Gallery on Wed. Oct. 26th includes:

Dylan Thomas
Jane Kenyon (who is dead)
Rosalia de Castro — tho' we are looking for English translations of her work. . . anybody have any?
Sappho
Rumi
Shel Silverstein
Gertrude Stein
Emily Dickenson
Walt Whitman"

Hurrah for Good, Gray poets! Speaking of which, I have noticed a trend in blogs at the end of the week to randomly link to various other people's home sites simply because they have nothing to say on a Friday morning, probably still sleep-hung over from a long night spent changing adult diapers on the dementia ward and answering call-lights (just a guess, really).

As a vehement blog poet, I loath such tactics. So what if people say nice things about you when there are repetitive villanelles to write? And the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack to make snide comments about? And Poets & Writer's selections of debut poetry featuring: Andrea Baker, Christian Barter, Geoff Bouvier, Leslie Bumstead, Victoria Chang, Geri Doran, K.E. Duffin, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Dana Goodyear, Sarah Gridley, Tyehimba Jess, Corinne Lee, Sheryl Luna, Rusty Morrison, Dead Poets!, Matthew Shenoda, Laura Sims, Mark Sullivan and Catherine Wing? And those damn, lying apes? However, if I was going to do something like that, it would look a little like this:

I have been laughing all week over Jim Behrle's " What the Hell is Up With Your Author Photo?" series, this week featuring poor, abused Forrest Gander.

Here is a photo of Marci Johnson in action at the April 2005 AWP Conference in Vancouver, Canada.

Come this Thursday (Oct. 27, suckers) The Gore Gore Girls (lo-fi energy! b-horror movies! go-go boots!) will be playing at Mac's Bar in Lansing. Hurrah! The Gore Gore Girls Rock!

The Happy Booker kicks off Elizabeth Poliner week on her blog.

I finally found another artistic nurse! Unkempt Woman is wonderful, worth the 1.6 seconds it takes to click on her link for her "Nurse Cow" quip.

Just because my local alt dot collge dot com radio station still plays it, here is everything you ever wanted to know about The Nails' 88 Lines About 44 Women.

The Radish King orders you: "Buy Books! Buy mine, especially. And Punk Poems by John Burgess. And Kathryn Rantala's Missing Pieces." Or as Pax Fuscata puts it: "These spunky books have volunteered to help out the way we all do: Uno alla volta. One at a time."

Isn't it odd that during time of social peace poets write poems of anarchy and chaos but when actual disaster strikes our fair country poets almost never advocate rioting? I discovered today that "riots" in Italian is "Tumulti;" in German "Aufstände;" in French "Émeutes;" and in Chinese "暴亂." I think that is where today's villanelle should start:

Poets
faking
riots;

their jackets
burning.
Rebecca Riots;

burning her couplets
(romanticizing
raging riots)

Bathos forfeits
rage; for raging
poets

this merits
woe, slurring
"limits" with "riots."

As if poets have limits.
As if rhyming
poets
start riots.

1. By the way, if you happen to land at Agana Won Pat International Airport, having intended to go to 2006 Manchester Poetry Festival (hint, hint Shelby) but realizing at the last moment no one goes to Manchester when there is Guam, remember what Elizabeth Warnock Fernea said in "A View of the Nile": "Nobody is ever met at the airport when beginning a new adventure. It's just not done." [back]
2. Question: have I flogged this enough? It's a Dead Poet reading, folk. Dead Poets! [back]

"I know you're in there - I can smell your brain …" Return of the Living Dead (1985)

I suppose if I were forced by powers beyond my control to come back as a zombie, a flesh eating one might be of some interest. Yet it seems so stereotyped, commonplace, platitudinous. And why a hunger for brains? I don't like the brain;¹ the spleen is much better. Or gonads, ovaries, testes? Just think of all the Freudian symbolism in a testes-eating zombie film. John Osborne would go crazy. Perhaps the world needs a testes-eating villanelle? Something along the lines of Mark Strand's "Eating Poetry": "Ink runs from the corners of my mouth … I romp with joy in the bookish dark"? Or Wislawa Szymborska's wonderful "Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem;"

In the poem's opening words
the authoress asserts that while the Earth is small,
the sky is excessively large and
in it there are, I quote, "too many stars for our own good" …

Too much rapture for our own good … too much of everything for our own good! Maybe we need to start with corrections, then? One of my friends, Lydie, who lives in a little house on the French Atlantic coast, sent this to me about a week ago; correction of my little French poem. She wrote, in part, "I found myself really suprised this morning … I was not expecting … translations in 6 different languages including unreadables, and so on … I also read that you stayed in Armenia for a while; which explains why you translated in this language (I first thought you were insane) …"

Tu ne peux pas te regarder
dans les vagues. Toute
chose va tres vite. Mon
visage est cicatrisé
ou abîmé par
les fleurs qui flottent
dans la mer.

Thank you, Pimousse, thank you! With Szymborska's and Lydie's comments in mind, with Pablo Neruda's "Poet's Obligation" and "Oatmeal," by Galway Kinnell in mind, I thnk this is where we shall start, with a word, "oracular," meaning "1. of, relating to, or being an oracle; 2. resembling or characteristic of an oracle: a) solemnly prophetic; b) enigmatic; obscure" —

spit it out/ the word/ all oracular
words/ meaning: heat/ flash/ you, meaning: rapture

But let us not be enigmatic or obscure because we have nothing to say; let's not confuse or surprise anyone because its easier to be obscure than wise, sagacious, understandable. Because, because, words concerning empty poetry aren't the only thing that happened to me lately. Photoplay, cinema, moving pictures also surprised me. At some point in the distant past I thought I would be clever and devise a grand "list of every movie featuring a poet or poem I could think of;" string them together in some loose way and present it to the world. By all means, I thought, no one else could have thought about Hollywood's connection to the spoken word as source for inspiration and fascination. The list took a long while because I rarely watch movies. A little of what followed looked a bit like this:

Dylan Thomas' "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" in Solaris, (2002);
Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric" from Bull Durham (1988);
Edgar Allan Poe's “Ulalume” in Lolita (1962);
Langston Hughes' "Montage of a Dream Deferred" in A Raisin in the Sun (1961);
T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men from Apocalypse Now (1979);
"The Song of Songs" from the Bible in Once upon a Time in America (1984);
W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues" in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994);
Charles Baudelaire's "The Jewels" in La Letrice [The Reader] (1988);
Dorothy Parker's "Resume" in Girl, Interrupted (1999);
W.B. Yeats' "The Stolen Child in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001);
Federico Garcia Lorca's "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías" in The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca (1997) …

Then, one fine morning before dawn, I discovered that Stacey Harwood had beaten me to the punch some time ago with "Poetry in Movies," a much more exhaustive list than I could ever hope to come up with published in The Michigan Quarterly Review. This just proves there is great joy not only in moving your arms but in discovering there are no original thoughts under the sun. Sooner or later I will discover everything I have written was footnoted a long time ago in some translated, yellowing, rag-tag autobiography, journal, hagiography. And yes, before you ask, the line: "talking vulgar of the furies" is a poor man's riff on Yusef Komunyakaa's book title: "Talking Dirty to the Gods." O, fou, fou, fou, sauvage, sauvage, sauvage.

spit it out/ my word/ all oracular,
crude/ we are always so crude?/ speak all these
words/ meaning: heat, flash, you/ meaning: rapture

except you don't/ buy it/ myths/ gods/ moisture
for you isn't hades' dew/ crises
you spit out/ your words/ all oracular

with rage/ doubting is rage/ each more vulgar
as if/ "talking vulgar of the furies"/
could mean words: heat/ flash/ you, could mean: rapture

too/ rapture without hubris/ a seizure
without a body/ you mouth a word:/ "please"
spit it out/ the word/ all oracular

in its fawning/ "you[r w]help"/ see? these lesser
signs hide inside the bigger/ our whimsies'
words/ meaning: heat/ flash/ you/ meaning: rapture

"i honk rapture"/ reads a bumper sticker
crudely/ we are always crude/ but with ease
we spit it out/ words/ all oracular
words/ meaning: heat/ flash/ you, meaning: rapture

1. Regardless of Woody Allen quipping it is his second favorite organ. [back]

I found this morning a bit cold when I rose from bed; autumn, they say dismissively. It seemed logical then that I should add a new page to this blog-thingie of mine: "Contests, Awards and Deadlines" — under the idea that we all need awards and if other people are as bad as I am in remembering when various deadlines are due then a check-list of sorts will help someone, somewhere. I also submitted three sonnets to the 12th annual Howard Nemerov Sonnet Contest, as well. You might think all I do is write villanelles in my free time, but I spent the year of 2004 doing little else than write sonnets. And really, to win $1000 for one of your own sonnets? That would be wonderful. In the meanwhile, here is today's pick for poetry magazines to submit your work to and keep an eye on:

Rainbow Curve, a journal of poetry and fiction, seeks submissions for Issue #8 (Spring 2006). Sample copy: $7 (includes postage). Send submissions or guideline requests with SASE to Julianne Bonnet and Daphne Young, Editors, Rainbow Curve, P.O. Box 93206, Las Vegas, NV 89193-3206.

Yesterday began splendidly, as many splendid days do, with brunch. What I liked the most about brunch was there was a steady flow of fresh coffee. I know its a diuretic, but I love it so. Then it moved slowly into the afternoon and I attended a placentas burial ceremony.

The Genesee Neighborhood Co-Op in Lansing has, among other things, a social garden plot at the end of one of their cul-de-sacs. What was once several families backyards has now been turned into a communal courtyard/ common space. It looks rather nice and now has in addition two newly planted, placentally-enriched apple tree saplings as well.

Two of Shelby's friends had babies last year and they kept their placentas in their freezers until they felt it was time to hold a "placenta burial ceremony" in honor of their children. The placentas in question had been placed in large mixing bowls and looked like so much raw meat I had a small flashback to a sweat lodge ceremony I attended in the shadow of Mt. Charleston¹ where the elders passed around a bowl of raw meat and blackberries to share in after a seriously hot sweat with eighteen Grandfathers². That certain red-wet meatness sitting in its own juices found only in mammal flesh; I recall looking down at the bowl and thinking: "If I eat this everything will change — everything." The sweat-lodge meat-and-berries mixture, that is, not the placentas.

It was a boundless day, full of small clouds and leaves just starting to change when we sang a couple of home-made songs and lowered the placentas, one to each baby apple tree, into the ground. We all scooped a cup-full of fresh earth to help bury them. Now these children will be forever linked to this semi-ruined industrial town, this geography of wastelands, this sprawl of suburban hieroglyphs. Not so bad, when you think of it. My parents did something similar with my own placenta. They drove out into the wild foothills of Los Angeles and hung my placenta in a tree that looked as if it would last for another five hundred years. That was 1970, when there still were wild foothills. It is strange to think that at the hungry i The Kingston Trio could have introduced their song "South Coast" talking about mountain lions and everyone knew that they were still prowling about; "but the lion still rules the barranca/ and a man there is always alone." I have no wish to go hunting for that tree, that part of the world; it was probably chopped down decades ago and paved over. I am probably now spiritually bound to a mini-mall or 7-11. Mapping of nowhere, hieroglyphs of suburban sprawl, the navigation of our wastelands, indeed.

1. The Southern Utes consider Mt. Charleston that can be seen everywhere in Las Vegas, NV, the holy center of the world. As a gesture of friendliness, reciprocity, tutelage several elders hosted a monthly "open" sweat lodge for those of use who aren't Ute to share in a sacred experience. One glance at the mountain, however, and you see it is a crime against nature that the center of the world has track homes and smog surrounding it everywhere [back]
2. A "Grandfather" is a large stone heated white hot and placed in the fire-pit in the center of the lodge. Since stones are sacred, the leader of that day's sweat lodge goes out in the pre-dawn light and finds two dozen or so Grandfathers that wish to participate in that afternoon's sweat. Once everyone is in and the lodge flap secured, it is pitch black inside. You sit shoulder to shoulder with nearly naked strangers who are now friends for that short period. The only light is the crackling of stones, the only sound is our chanting and singing and the hiss as water is added to the Grandfathers. Even in the foothill of Mt. Charleston, 100 degrees outside is still 100 degrees. Added to that five Grandfathers and your fellow sweat lodge companions' body heat and you find yourself in a "sweating freely" heat. Eighteen Grandfathers and my lungs rip and burn, I am calling out to long dead ancestors I know nothing about and life is about as glorious as one could wish. [back]

Okay folks, Mouseketeer blog-roll call; this week's review is all about poetry and music …

"Poetry as music?" you ask. Not really; why do certain poetry blogs favor name-dropping various CDs and musical artists for no apparent reason? Is it because they are listening to that very track on that very CD as they write their morning's posting? Perhaps. I like the idea of "original thought" when it comes to certain insights, however. Ron Silliman has a very thoughtful piece about the Bob Dylan documentary that was aired on PBS a week or so ago. Marci Johnson's #9 CD she is currently listening to is Super Furry Animals, Phantom Power. Collin Kelley totes Dustin Brookshire and his acoustic songwriting. Yesterday I mentioned Eduardo C. Corral's Cyndi Lauper quip. He also wrote a humorous bit on lip-syncing at home:

I've always loved lip-syncing. I'm talking about full blown lip-syncing. I stand in the middle of my room and move and shake and dance my body as I "sing." I get a kick out of acting out the emotions tied up in the songs. If it's a sad song I beat my chest, and throw my arms around. If it's a happy song I make these quirky gestures with my hands, and shake what Buddha gave me. It releases the inner Drag Queen in me.

Then there are poets who are also musicians, and their blogs incorporate both. Joy Harjo's new CD, Native Joy for Real, looks fascinating; Harjo being both a fabulous poet and fabulous saxophonist. My grin-of-the-moment, spit-coffee-all-over-my-computer-in- excitment, however, is learning the Chinese characters for punk rock, 朋克摇滚, because I have been listening to the girl Chinese punk rock group Hang on the Box (挂在盒子上) for months, ever since I found it on CDBaby.com over the summer.

It is their song "Kill your Belly" (完全张显另)I have been hitting "repeat" over and over, though. A review of their music reads in part: "Only a punk-rock genius can come up with: "Kill your belly/Kill my belly/Kiss your belly/Kiss my belly/Keep your belly/Keep my belly/F**k you, I don't need you!/Ooooooo," while cowbells clatter in the background and one of the girls hums kazoolike. It's one minute, 17 seconds of pure brilliance."

Perhaps cowbells is what Modern Poetry needs? Or should we go in a more classical direction? Ginger Heatter recommends Yo-Yo Ma: The Cello Suites Inspired by Bach. Oni Buchanan, being both a poet and a pianist, promotes her Portraits, Pictures & Prints for Piano, a compilation of piano works inspired by the visual arts. And finally, T.E. Ballard asks, which rock chick are you? I would like to be the well-paid one with good dental insurance, thank you very much.