Myth of Arrival

This new WordPress isn't letting me post photos. That is too bad. I have a brand new flier I want to show you. It is of our local Valentine's Day poetry reading I will be attending, Burning Desires. A better review than I can give is here in an article I just happened to cut and paste for you.

Without calling the wrath of the gods down on my head, let me just say last year it was sort of an anti-desire poetry reading, or maybe a bitter (but not sweet) poetry reading.¹ You'd think if poets were good at one thing, writing love poems would be it. The poets who showed up, however, must have all been having rather unwholesome love lives that year since so many of them were reading poetry best described as I am lonely and bitter at couples who seem happy. Not exactly the stuff to put a luster in your toes and gleam in your laughter. And I love to laugh.

So, instead of bringing the images to you, why not I let you go to the images?

Here are the fliers from 2003 and 2005 and a love bench used in 2004.

But if I could show you the flier I'd hope you'd like it. It is rather "hep" and "far out." Instead, here is a photo my friend Sam took of Ruelain,Bob and I at a poetry reading this early autumn. Thanks, Sam!

[Update: here's the flyer pic!]

1. Bittersweet? What a strange combination of words, "bitter," "sweet," "bitter," "sweet,""bitter," "sweet." It could mean anything: 1) A dark, deep reddish orange. 2) A mixture of pain and pleasure. 3) A woody vine having small, round, yellow-orange fruits with red seeds. So many things for a small word! I wrote to a friend recently:

   I went down to my public library before work yesterday and found "Bittersweet: the very best of Nina Simone," "Love Songs" and "Four Women: the Philips Recordings." Simone — a voice that requires me to pay attention. I am always happy when I discover someone that I have to go back and think about deeply. What blows me away is that she was preforming in my lifetime. I think about a lot of jazz greats and think, "sure, it would have been great to see ____________ play their music, but they died ten years before I was even born." But a friend told me even in the 1980s she was performing regularly at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London. That just wasn't that long ago (not that I was in London in the 1980s, I first went to London in 1992) I wonder who is alive right now I am missing a chance to go and see? The Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin, lives in Detroit at this very moment. That just isn't that far from where I live. I wonder if years from now I will laugh and say: "if I only knew I would have got a bus ticket and gone to knock on her front door"? I doubt the Queen really wants a skinny white boy pounding on her door, however. [back]

My friend Tim Lane, who hosts the monthly open mic poetry series at Magdalena's Teahouse writes:

The next poetry reading is upon us. Well, not literally, like a weighted vest or a large rock, but you know what I mean.

Poetry at Magdalena's
Tuesday
Jan 31st
signup 7:45
poetry 8:00

Come
on
out

The Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out is on the stereo and all is well in the world. What with Valentine's Day fast approaching, you are probably thinking that you need to get your paramour a little something. Maybe even a little something-something.¹ So why not write a love poem for him/her/it? I found a wonderful Love Poem Generator, so you don't even have to work at it.

But beware, poetry generators on the whole tend to create poetry that is less lyrical and more obscure, less dramatic and more disorderly. While many people like this, especially the editors of Poetry magazine judging from this month's edition, it might make your paramour scratch his/her/its head in confusion. Better just to get a I Love South Dakota classic thong. I hear it is all the rage this year.

1. I'm not sure what "a little something-something" exactly is. I have a friend at work who uses the term whenever she is talking of romance and her husband, so I assume it is nefarious and obscenely biological. I have always wanted to be nefarious, but usually I must settle with just simply squalid … also, who exactly keeps a paramour in this day and age? [back]

Was anyone at the Rapp Saloon in the Hostelling International Building in Santa Monica on 1/20/06, which I believe was last Friday? How did the open mic go? Did you see Inspirachel?

I ask because, what was it, three years ago? Four? I cannot remember the date but at some point in my dim past I was a guest poet along with Rachel Kann of Santa Monica, CA, at a little cafe in Las Vegas, NV. For anyone out here in the wastelands of Michigan who has not heard of Inspirachel, you have only yourself to blame and you really should. In a letter she sent out last November, she wrote about a podcast she was working on with a friend:

also, if you don't know madge weinstein, act like you do. its time to make her acquaintance. we kicked it HARD this weekend at the dorkfest that was podcast expo. watch madge on location + me pouting at adam curry and listen to us talk stupid sh*t.

Way to go, Inspirachel. Look her up, my friends and don't forget to ask her about the Siren Collective.

Some time ago I started a journal. I am a terrible journal writer since I make up large sections of what has happened to me to amuse my "readers" (whoever they might be, someone in the far future I suppose) but I am also well aware of this. In the first page of my journal I wrote out for myself what I now see if my mini-philosophy on Negative Ecstasy. Interesting, since I would go back to that subject when I started this blog. I will only quote a bit, since most of it is illegible and repetitive:

The end result [of my creative process] is that my sonnets take on a sort of drifting, rambling, straggling quality to them, like I was making up lines to fit the rhyme since I am never really sure what direction the poem is taking. Sometimes I even … fib, exaggerate, embellish to keep the story moving. I love absurdity (as long as it is not happening to me)

Speaking of absurdity¹ I have been amusing myself by turning small real life situations into outlandish drama while writing my sonnets lately. For example, it is true that I do a lot of cumbrous lifting at work in the rest home. Many of my residents with Alzheimer's are unable to transfer themselves out of their beds and into their wheelchairs so I do it for them. It's not easy lifting 220 pounds of human flesh (I have no idea what that is kilos) from a stumpy, slumped over positions² but I tend to come home aching all over and dreaming about saunas, massages and steam baths. A poetry of steam baths? It sounds strangely tantalizing, exotic, libidinous.

Also, I put into the poem whatever is happening around me at the time. The radio was on and first I tuned in to a classical music station where they were playing a bit of cello by the composer Bach, then I switched to a local jazz station where John Coltrane and Bird, Charlie Parker, played back to back. There were a lot birds outside my window twittering in the morning light and so I thought: "ah ha! Zack is being clever," so that went into the poem too. Of course, alcohol, pain killers and aspirin aren't the way I get through the day (no, it is coffee), but this all had a nice ring to it and is a lot more exciting than just saying: "I need a massage, please." We love our tragic heroes, I guess.

Pain is a real pisser. To wake; yellow
phlegm, limbs shaking, lungs fluid filled, the brain
pan on fire. Nothing pleases. Bach's cello?
Birds' song outside? A low groan from Coltrane?
Nothing — but to wake and rise and labor
out of bed. Thrown into flesh's burdens
I gulp down pills with my coffee. Killer
migraines need migraine killers; mountains
of raw aspirin. Sleeping pills. Alcohol.
Enough to numb another day. Thirty
wild years and how many do I recall?
Just wild fear — of failure, of poverty,
you name it. Pain drove me. Ai, little word
of my core. You make life richly absurd.

1. As we all know some people are funnier than others. I don't have a television at home but I was helping one of my residents at work get ready for bed on Friday and he had his television on. The station was tuned to the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Channel ("for the hockey games," he said), and a comedy show, "Rick Mercer Talks to Americans," was playing. It was hilarious. It consisted in Mr. Mercer interviewing random Americans on the street and getting them to agree with bizarre "facts" about Canada. He persuaded Americans to say: "Congratulations, Canada, on legalizing insulin," "Please, Canada, stop putting your senior citizens on ice floes and sending them out to sea" or "Congratulations, Canada, on your first mile of paved road." The intent was to make fun of our American ignorance on all things Canadian, so he got various locals to urge the Canadian government to install a new air-conditioner to help save the National Igloo and to agree that the U.S. should bomb Saskatchewan. Of course, my short term memory being what it is, I couldn't remember the name of the show when I got home at midnight, but thanks to all powerful Internet I discovered what I had been watching and even an article Mr. Mercer wrote concerning how the show started. [back]
2. I have only thrown my back out at this job once. True, I lay on the ground crying in pain until help arrived and was unable to return to work for two weeks. The codeine they gave me to keep me numb helped a lot … I don't recall a lot of those weeks except I had difficulty getting to the bathroom [back]