Whine Glass--Half Empty

I know it's because I had a lousy night -- awoken at least four times by my own internals, by the cat outside, by the tightening and tightening of the chains of our quotidian constraints -- but I'm having an awful hard time doing what I need to do today. I don't need anyone to remind me that I am in the larger existential sense lucky. And I don't really think there's any cosmic force weighing things, allowing this much angst for that much fortune. But I'm worried. I'm worried that at this stage of life we haven't figured out how to play the game well enough to win more than we lose. I'm worried because my strength is failing me. It's not even that I don't want to fight any more, but that the wear and tear is killing me. Three steps up and two down, two steps up and three down. How long can one bear this?

I'll stop, I promise. The day is lovely. Maybe later on today I will be able to nap and probably the world will then improve. Maybe there will be a letter, a phone call, an email that will help me see it.

Just Musing

I know, it's been forever since I've posted anything here, but I couldn't resist responding to a message about poetry and muses on the Warren Wilson listserv so I'll post it here too.

Hey, Carlen, sometime last week you asked, “If any of you believe in a Muse (or muses), what is it you believe?” I’ve been thinking about this, as I really do believe in a muse. I suppose I believe in an inner figure who is not me and who I’d damn well better treat as real if I care about my writing. It’s rather corny but (like Greg, as I recall) I’ve been influenced by James Hillman. It may be corny but I think it works. When I’ve felt stuck in my writing it’s really helped me to sit and write a dialogue with my muse. In fact I think the corniness and the shallowness and the whole intellectual shamefulness of it is part of its essence. I think we’ve got to be willing to look stupid in order to be creative. I think we need less Derrida and more Mary had a little lamb.

Anyway, if you’re interested in reading further, here’s a short excerpt from Hillman’s Healing Fiction:

The next example is from an elderly man, well past sixty, who came from abroad after his wife had died. He had no children. He came to Zurich, took a little room, and began studying everything psychological that he could lay his hands on. He kept a journal. Here is an entry from the journal:

“August 27. Still so cold, I cooked a hot lunch, then back to Neumann. After a while my attention wandered and I heard a clear young voice say, “Where have you been staying, Father?” It could have been the voice of a boy or a girl. If I jump to the conclusion that because of the letter from B, the dream father is dead, then I can now take the father role. I am becoming a father. If it was a boy talking, then is he the divine child in me? Or what? If it was a girl, then presumably she will be an anima figure? But why do I become her father? I am lost ... Later: Since the above, I tried to contact the voice with all the most inviting phrases I could summon, but to no avail. Just sit back and love the voice, you old fool. Relax.”

I do believe you have felt this man’s simple and rather tragic mistake. It is simple because all he would have had to do was hear the child’s question—where has he been?—and try to respond to it. And it is tragic in that he answered the voice by psychologisms and interpretations, that is, he used psychology against the soul. ... The child did not say ‘love me.’ It asked him, loud and clear, where have you been staying, father. He missed the moment. All his beseeching and cajoling could not bring it back ....

Other echoes / Inhabit the garden

… shall we follow them? A lovely lamb-like March day, almost 60° -- not as warm as the next few days are forecast. I opened the shades in my office that I need to keep closed in the morning to see the monitor and looked out at the garden. One of the Douglas irises was in bloom, so I went out to look at it. Outside, I saw that another had bloomed and gone already, without my seeing it. Hopefully, John saw it, and the Greta sniffed at it. But it made me sad that my life is so busy and in turmoil that I'd missed it entirely. Maybe this weekend we can put in some time out back.

Elsewhere in the garden is a volcanic-type rock with a hole in it. A calla lily is blooming straight through the hole. Well, okay, I suspect John set that up to happen but still, it's neat, isn't it?

Here's a question that needs to be asked: If you have submitted a ms. to a competition one year, is it worth resubmitting it the next year if it's unchanged or hardly changed?

Stay-at-home Cinderella

Well, I wish I'd been to AWP, though I would probably be a hundred times green with envy and consumed by desire to be read and admired. But I would rather be anywhere than in my little life right now, for reasons I'm not at liberty … Though I love my John, my son and his sweetie, and my dog.

If I can drum up any excuse, I'll be at the next one in NYC, the city that is like someone I sort of knew a long time ago. And I will see if the old haunts are still haunted -- or there.

Dorset Update

Received notice this a.m. that Sandra Meek of Mt. Berry, GA is the winner of this year's Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press). I'll bet she has fun at AWP.

My ms., Demimonde, was one of 23 semifinalists out of 1,200 submissions. Oh well.

Sunday bit

We now have a decorous, little, yellow No Through Street sign on the corner, where the huge rude red Dead End sign was for a short time, only a little while ago. Still, you would be surprised at how many people drive up this hill, only to have to do a U-turn on top. Once, there was even a police pursuit up here, just like the movies. You used to be able to walk over the top of the hill, part of the Orizaba bump, a huge rock that is city owned, but the houses up there encroached, and they say possession is 9/10 of the law. So now it's No Through Street for people too, and when I walk the dog over the hill, we have to come down Orizaba or Jules and walk back up ours.

I'm sure that was fascinating. Not much poetry happening here. As usual, lines pass through my brain, but I don't feel at liberty these days to grab them and write them down.

We may get the house painted, adding another huge bit to what we owe the banks. Well, we've been driving around and looking at colors.

Rain was fierce last night, or so John tells me. I've been sleeping poorly for days and last night was so far gone, I slept right through it. In this caesura of sun I should take out the dog.

Waazat?

Two loud explosive noises that startled me, and then, even louder, a third. But I don't hear any sirens, so I guess it's nothing. There is construction on Grafton, our cross street (all morning the jackhammers were hammering; now it is quiet). I suspect they were just unloading some large delivery there.

The sky is gray and blue, a serious pretty. The way the light is hitting the ocean -- the closer portion a pearly white, the farther part a deeper pewter -- it looks like the container ship that's out there is defying gravity, floating. Yes, I know it is floating, but it looks to be floating on a cloud.

I was at SF State today for a meeting with a student. When I finished my miscellaneous business, the one-way street I was parked on was blocked by a delivery truck. About 15 or so cars were stuck, everyone just waiting. We could see that the shuttle driver behind the truck had called someone, and everyone, like me, must have just figured what is there to do? People were bored, but relatively resigned. No one leaned on a horn.

Speaking of resigned, I got notice in the mail today of another competition where I am a semifinalist.

I'm reading Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. I love her writing, how she ties things together, makes you experience the shifts of consciousness that happen, takes you into the mind of an earlier time. I'd like to do as much in my poetry somehow.

Gosh

So I'm filling out an application for a scholarship -- yeah, you can guess, I'm sure. And I swear that I read that you need to provide the names and addresses of two people in the writing field who can provide references. This isn't easy for people like me who got their graduate degrees decades ago and who aren't that good at schmoozing. But I got my courage together to write to two people who have been kind to me in the past. One answered immediately; the other took some tracking down. But both said v. nice things, agreed to be references. Okay, now I go to fill out my application and only one name is needed! I have half a mind to put down both anyway! I can't decide. And what could be the harm?

Well, I don't know, but I'm thinking about it.

I'm in a decent frame of mind this morning -- class over and almost a week before the next. I need to start preparing for my other class, my poetry workshop, if indeed there are enough registered for it to happen. And I actually have some editing work coming in tomorrow.

Valentine's Day was good. Lovely lavender roses, champagne, smoked salmon and marscarpone on sourdough toast for dinner, Jon Stewart and old SNL on the TV.

Signs and Wonders

Out this morning with the dog a little later, around 7:00. Clouds a pale pink with underside of taupe, the frivolous and the solemn. As we walked -- without my noticing the transition -- the sky turned a steadfast blue. John's fleece-lined yellow jacket I had borrowed became a redundancy, as did my gloves and white wool beret.

Now it's mid morning, breakfast of sourdough cracked wheat toast with peanut butter, grapefruit juice, and black coffee over, John and dog gone to the studio, I pulled out the yoga mat. I think it's been months since I've done yoga -- I've been so stressed -- and it's stupid, stupid, stupid not to, because it always makes me feel less stressed, optimistic, not yet cured of my winter soul, but better.

Oh yeah, I checked the flower boxes in front of the house. Tulips beginning to push up beneath the violas.

California Gothic

It's a nice quiet rainy weekend in San Francisco -- well, at least, for me. I've been very involved with the class I'm teaching at SF State in the TPW program. It takes almost all of my time and energy. In between, I try to keep up with po biz -- submitting, applying, and so forth.

We got a lot done today, a lot of little things, like putting up paintings in my office. And, of course we spent quality time with Greta la pooch. We cleaned, we got groceries. What? You want something more exciting here? You want poetry?

Here's an old poem, an old, old poem. How old? It was written when I lived at my first San Francisco address (a totally cool address: 789 Tenth Avenue). We moved from there in 1982. The poem was in my Master's thesis. But it was written on a rainy day, like this.

California Gothic

More rain comes down on streets already slick --
    purple liquids  iridescent greens
ooze, effulgent
    scum, jewels -- cool, radiant, evil ...

Two doors away, medics remove a small white parcel,
    the elderly lady who lived there
who, bird-boned, beak-nosed
    neither spoke or smiled
but only, over and over
    swept her piece of sidewalk.

Sick or dead? you ask, as I enter.
    I don't know, I tell you.
I want to forget her, now that I'm next to
   your dry, warm skin
but the palm fronds sway,
    retreat and beckon --
shadow of a hand trying to get in.

A good evening

Last night was a really good evening here on my high, gray hill. (BTW, someone stole the new and enormous red "Dead End" sign, recently at the foot of the hill. I imagine the sign is decorating some dorm room somewhere.) Well, I came back from class, survivor that I am, and John was home about five minutes later. Over a bottle of 2-Buck-Chuck Shiraz and a baked frozen Trader Joe's pizza, John told me the good news. The SF Opera director, David Gockley is pushing for John's photography, has told "his people" to make the show happen. Oh, it won't happen right away. They need more of the divas represented, they want every opera photographed. (John has photographed principals, chorus, and supers in costume -- gorgeous and unusual detailed portraits that knock you out.) But he's got a virtual guarantee now that it will happen. John has been working on this so long and so hard. It is just wonderful news.

As for me, I've got a bad cold, have used up enough tissues to deforest a small forest. I very rarely get sick, and I'm fairly annoyed that I have. I was planning on going out this morning to distribute fliers for my City College C.E. poetry workshop that starts in March, but I'm probably going to stay in with my green tea and my space heater, the fog outside in the city and inside my head.

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Here's an article from the Boston Globe about what eleven poets are reading. What are you reading?



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In the mind of the beholder

Oh, tired. That second cup of coffee better do it for me. It's bad enough to get up in the six o'clock dark to walk the dog, but when you wake up an hour earlier -- I heard John's "grandfather clock" chime and could swear it chimed six times, but it must have been five -- well, I lay there wondering if I hadn't set the alarm. I am too nearsighted to see a clock without my glasses, and putting on my glasses … Okay, enough of this.

Yesterday was my first class (teaching) at SF State. I'm teaching not poetry, but a course in the Technical and Professional Writers Program. The first hurdles were tough: getting an ID card and email account and so forth -- and getting this all in the name I use now vs. the name I used as a graduate student. But I've cleared most of those hurdles, and yesterday was the class. Hooboy. I won't say I was awful, but, if I had a buck for every time I said "uh," I could retire and write. So, okay, I guess it will get easier, and I do have a lot of real world experience to impart, but let me say that last night, when I was back home to John's hug and a large glass of wine, it was an immense relief. And now there are just fifteen more classes to go.

Meantime, my contract writing job has gone dormant, which means ouch …

The other day, I sat in my car, eating a tuna sandwich and listening to the public radio while waiting until it was time for my appointment with the TPW director. I was listening to a program discussing the death of -- no, not poetry! -- classical music. The whole discussion was word-for-word identical to those we've all heard bemoaning the lack of audience and respect for poetry. They even had Dana Gioia there (who, by the way, never brought up poetry, though he talked about the necessity of maintaining public school programs for music, journalism, and theatre). Well, they also brought on the prize-winning composer John Corigliano. And he changed the tack of the discussion a bit.

He started talking about how necessary it was for radio to broadcast and people to attend concerts for new music, "classical" compositions by modern composers. This was because of the important "adventure of of learning what you think of what you are listening to." (I hope I got that quote right.) By making critical judgments for oneself, he maintained, one particpated in the art experience. He said he wasn't saying not to listen to the old masters, but that you lacked this experience when listening to a performance of their work. You could listen for all sorts of things in the performance, but you accept that Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and so forth are great.

This rang all sorts of bells with me. For one thing, I remember growing up in NYC and attending fine arts films when I was a teenager. (Yeah, I actually watched movies then, before I was hypersensitive to them.) And I remember once or twice leaving the movie with my friends who would like something and I wouldn't or I would like something that they wouldn't, and what a thrill it was, to think about the reasons and to have an opinion. It was all new then!

I love this part of reading new poetry too, of reading something -- one reason I like tackling poems one at a time, instead of book-wise too -- and savoring it in my mouth and hearing it in my mind and deciding for myself what I think ot it. It brings up that whole idea of different people being ready for art at different times too. But the experience of art for oneself. Think about it.

From the Spaceship

I switched over to the new Blogger and am trying to post again. As I said in my comment below, I’ve been combing through old stuff in my mother’s house, including some of my old records from high school. Surrealistic Pillow, Cheap Thrills, Blonde on Blonde. One that brought back memories was Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. I actually saw Miles play several of the pieces from Bitches Brew at the Monterey Jazz Festival (in 1969?), and, unbelievably, I saw him with my mother.

All this music and recording also reminded me of the wonderful Ralph J. Gleason, jazz (and later rock) critic for the San Francisco Chronicle for many years. I found Gleason’s liner notes for the original Bitches Brew. Here’s an excerpt:

it will never be the same again now, after in a silent way and after BITCHES BREW. listen to this. how can it ever be the same? i don’t mean you can’t listen to ben. how silly. we can always listen to ben play funny valentine, until the end of the world it will be beautiful and how can anything be more beautiful than hodges playing passion flower? he never made a mistake in 40 years. it’s not more beautiful, just different. a new beauty. a different beauty. the other beauty is still beauty. this is new and right now it has the edge of newness and that snapping fire you sense when you go out there from the spaceship where nobody has ever gone before.

Today this attitude feels to me like a breath of fresh air: celebrating the electricity of new art without denying the beauty of the old. Isn’t this the only honest attitude to have? I would love to hear someone praise cutting-edge experimental poetry and at the same time say, “How can anything be more beautiful than Keats’ ‘To Autumn’?” I would love to hear someone praise James Wright and at the same time praise the snapping fire of contemporary experiments with language. Isn’t anything else just posturing and hypocrisy?

Post post

I'll be brief: I went through with the dental torture that I've put off since November. I guess my dentist is very persuasive. She let me know that the choice was: bad now or really bad some time down the road. I'm a real wuss, though, and even having a good excuse for ice cream this evening did not remotely make this fun.

Well, back to the ice pack -- peas and carrots, carrots and peas. Wish the ibuprofren would kick in.

Just noticed

Um, so we're on the new Blogger now, and it's just like the old Blogger. Little different, but not much. But I just realized we've lost our team list on the right here ----> and instead, my picture is smilin' at you. But only until I figure out how to get our team list back. So don't worry.

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This is the scoop: "Team members who have not yet switched to the new version will still see the blog on their dashboards, but it will be grayed out and inaccessible. Once those members move their own accounts to the new version of Blogger, they will be able to access the blog as before."

Let's work on this ...

Whoohoo! We're back in business!

Yes, I haven't fallen off the planet, but was having publishing problems, as is evident below. I finally figured it out about ten minutes ago (will spare you the details).

And no, for all that, there's not much news. Maybe I'll think of something by the time I get back from walking the dog.

Testing (again)

Been trying to publish, without success, for about 5 days now. Will this work?

Let's see if this works ...

Been having a lot of trouble republishing the blog. Last night, I switched to the new Blogger in hopes it would help, and well it didn't. But let's try it this morning.

New post, same as the old post

Anyone know where I got that title from? No matter. It would only prove how old I am. My point is, I don't really have much to say, but it's been more than a week since someone posted here, and there's nothing as boring as a stagnant blog.

I thought seriously of changing to the new Blogger template, but I thought better of it. I will, eventually, just have too many things on my mind right now. Not that I'm very busy ... Okay, FedEx just delivered a template I needed, so I actually have something to do. Sort of. But mostly, two jobs on hold (bills not on hold, unfortunately). My teaching job at SFSU to start in two weeks. My other teaching job at CCCE to start in two months. Lots of po biz deadlines coming up. I NEED TO GET ORGANIZED!

But where to start? When my son used to freak out about disorganization, I would tell him it doesn't matter where you start. Start anywhere. I also would say not to get overwhelmed about the magnitude of the problem. I need a mom, that's what! Alas.

What I really need is not nagging but to stop the nagging feeling that it doesn't matter. I need something good to happen. I've been holding myself up, like a suspension bridge, too long.

Parties are over, new year's begun

Must remember to go out and get New Year's cards. It's not premeditated, my sending cards so late, but it's happened for years now. There's just all this other crap to do by a certain date and now, well, theoretically, I have 363 days to write and send them. Okay, I've also been waiting to do a family photo for the cards. With a family of *3* -- now 4 -- and a photographer in the family, you'd think that wouldn't be a problem, but then you don't know how things happen around here. If I'm going to insist on the photos, I may need 363 days ....

It was hard getting up this morning in the dark, hard getting back into my typical weekday routine of throwing on my clothes and taking the dog out, continuing my dreams while I sleepwalk, just as long as I don't get doggie or self run over. But I'm not sorry the holiday routine is over. I'm tired of parties. My body is tired of living on cheese and crackers; I need to get back to my three times a week working out; I have a mountain of laundry, an empty bank account, and anxiety dreams. And I'm all out of small talk.

Yesterday, at a party, a probably very well-meaning person asked me what kind of poetry I wrote. Well, Robert was at the same party and he introduced us as poets. I had to assure the questioner that no, we didn't make our livings writing sonnets. But to the question of kind, I had no answer. Robert started to answer for me, and I didn't agree with his taxonomy. I went off in search of wine to help my answer. But then it seemed easier to avoid the question entirely, to stick to the easier party topics like neighborhoods and schools and college applications -- for which everyone has opinions.

Well, then, hoping that Robert isn't mad at me for copping out, I thought I would post the question here. I'm hoping it's at least a few months before I'm in party mode again and have to have an answer. But what answers do you have for that question (what kind of poetry do you write?)? How much do assume your questioner knows or doesn't know? Do they just want to hear whether you use rhyme? Would you give the same answer to all questioners, or do you tailor it? I often give the short, snotty answer, "my kind." But I know that doesn't mean anything. Is that insulting to the questioner? Tell me what you think!

BTW, I never kept last year's resolution to read through my entire poetry shelves from A-Z. In fact, I never got out of the Bs. So this year, like the perpetual dieter who always swears to lose X number of pounds and can't keep to it, I'm going to generalize my goals. So, I will read more (poetry). And God help me, this year, I'm going to have my book accepted.