The imaginary poet thugs try to take me down.

I couldn't, for the life of me, get this photo to post in the correct direction. But maybe that's appropriate to what I want to say today. As part of my haphazard exploration of poetry, I've been listening to the Poetry Foundation's podcasts while I zone out and play mahjong online. It's true. This is what I do sometimes to wind down at the end of the day. That and have a glass of whiskey. I used to watch the evening news, maybe a little Simpsons, an occasional round of Jeapordy! but the TV is for DVDs only now. So instead I listen to things like Matthew Zapruder and producer Curtis Fox talk about John Ashbery's poem "How to Continue."

What I like about this short podcast is Zapruder's willingness to read a poem and sit in confusion afterwards, to dwell in feeling rather than thought. In fact he goes even further and says that after first reading the poem "I didn't know what I felt and that didn't bother me." He goes on to say that "you have to be ready to not know everything right away" and that you should resist the urge to think every poem is a metaphor. Thank you, Matthew Zapruder. That's just what I needed to hear.

Reading poems makes people feel stupid too often. I feel stupid much of the time even when I'm all alone reading a poem in bed. I want that to stop. Zapruder had a worthwhile technique that I think will work with at least some of my stumbling blocks. Simply read it again. And again. And again. Of course, the emotional tug has to be there first. Something has to grab me to want to spend that much time with a poem, but there's no need to abandon hope simply because I "don't get it."

If I never "get it" it still has to be okay to just like the sound of the words. Feel the thrum of joy or sadness without knowing why. Thrum without any kind of emotional label at all. Maybe this is basic stuff, but I think most people, if they ever think about poetry, think it's impenetrable. If you don't walk away enlightened then you're dumb and the pursuit of understanding is pointless. Avoid poetry at all costs.

I will admit that I have an irrationally strong fear of looking stupid. Even as I wrote the above paragraphs I thought how some poet friend is going to read this and say no, no, no...that's not how you go about reading poetry at all. Nice try, dumbass. Or they'll say, No shit Sherlock. I can't believe you're just figuring this out. (This is how the poet thugs talk in my brain) The imaginary poet thugs will then present a detailed and articulate argument for why I'm wrong. Such are my neuroses.

If I give in to this fear, however, no poetry will get read. So I'm going to buck up and read Ammons' book. One poem, "The Unifying Principle" that I was struggling with last night ends with the phrase "the small wraths of ease." Explain that to me if you'd like, but it doesn't matter. I'll like it regardless.

More poetry, more poetry. I've taken up the poetry x 12 challenge offered by Dana Guthrie Martin. This month the challenge is to read a collection that was published in the year you were born. I'm still waiting for my copy of A.R. Ammons' Uplands to come in at the library as well as Mona Van Duyn's To See, To Take.

I love the focus this kind of challenge offers, not too narrow, but a useful tool in beginning my navigation through some wide wide water. My further challenge will be to actually understand some of the work. I suspect a superficial yeah or nay may be all I'm capable of at first. What is the poem trying to do? I don't know. What is the poem about? I don't know. Do I like the words and rhythms? Yes, I hope so. Yes.

As an example, here's one by Ammons that I love for its language though I'm highly uncertain what it's about.

The City Limits

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

Writing in Bed.

For the last three years, the spare bedroom in my house has been my retreat as well as my office, workout space and closet. At the end of the year I had to deconstruct the space and recreate it in my own bedroom. Time for a new roommate.

New roommate is great. We love him. New office is strange. Sitting at the computer doesn't feel quite right yet. Looking at the wall or my own reflection in the mirror instead of the window and my neighbor's patio is a change, not good or bad. But I'm not drawn to the space yet.

Instead, I've discovered that I really like writing in bed. We keep the heat at around 60 degrees in our house during the winter. More than a few minutes at my desk and my hands are ice, my feet are chilled. I looked over my shoulder on one of my first days at my new desk space and there was the fake fur comforter, the electric blanket, the cat.

I grabbed the laptop, slipped beneath the covers and found that being warm does wonders for my creative flow. I'll be in good company too. Twain, Proust, Wharton, Percy, these are a few of the writers who propped up their pillows, blanketed their knees and broke out the pen and paper. I figure, if dreaming is as close as I can get to pure imagination, then why not settle in the spot where dreams happen and hope that a few of them cling to the covers and climb back into my brain.

See ya later, sucker!

Here are a few photos from the two days I actually left the house this month. Once for a walk on Mt. Tabor on Christmas Day, one on an evening adventure for pie and Peacock Lane, the insane street near my house that draws hundreds of gawkers, wreaks havoc with local traffic and made something in the pit of my stomach twist and vibrate in nauseating turns. The last photo is from our one day of snow so far, a mere inch or so that caused 4-5 hour delays on the highways. Days like that, I'm thankful for my housebound life.

Now...let's get on with it. Bring on 2010. A new decade, a new chance to fight off the flypaper stick of inertia with pen and paper, keyboard and shutter snap.

Poetry vs. Ohio State

My book group for writers met at my house last night. Not only did it compel me to give the slanty shanty a good scrub behind the ears, but it gave me the opportunity to dwell in poetry for a good portion of the day. That's a good place to be. One I'd forgotten about for a while.

Most of the year our group reads novels and stories and essays, but in December we read poetry to each other, not for critique or for any in-depth discussion, but simply because we love it. At least, some of us do. What a great thing, to have friends in my house with stacks of poetry books by their side, reading and re-reading.

I laugh. My neighbor brings his friends together every weekend to watch college football on a TV tucked into the corner of his tiny patio. They drink and cheer and thrill over it. I bring my friends together and we sip wine and tea, nibble at cookies and scones and read Wallace Stevens and Mary Szybist. I will never love football. They will never love poetry. Sad for both of us, in some ways.

It's not that I'm a rampant consumer of poetry. I wish I read more widely and understood more deeply. But I try. A poetry book gets into my hands once every few months. It should be every day. I've tried a poetry new year's resolution but it was something vague, without any kind of daily dedication. Maybe I will try again. A poem a day. I'll start with the Poetry Foundation's daily poetry offerings in audio. Why don't you join me? Maybe then we can gather some weekend and drink and cheer and thrill over what we find.

Joy to the world?

Being busy has always been a virtue in my family. "Are you keeping busy?" is one of the only questions my 96 year old grandmother consistently still asks me. It's the same question my parents both ask me when they hand the phone back and forth on a Sunday call.

My schedule as a massage therapist has been full to the brim lately . My work as a writer has been giving me a good nightly excuse to avoid the bitter cold that recently gripped our usually mild city. This makes my family very happy and in these times of rampant unemployment, I certainly won't complain about it.

I will, however, note that being busy has never been the most important point. I guess I'd prefer that the question was "Have you been enjoying yourself?" The answer is the same. Yes. A modicum of joy comes with feeling secure and successful in my work. But more of it comes from watching the cat absorb the tiniest square of sunlight that penetrates my chilly living room in the afternoon. More of it comes from pulling the warm covers over my head for ten more minutes of sleep and eating homemade bread for breakfast with my beaux.

These are considerations for the privileged, certainly. And certainly most privileged people would agree that joy is in these small things, not in simply having a full schedule. While a vast majority of the world is simply trying to survive to the next day, here in a land buried in plastic lead-filled crap, and dotted with abandoned 8,000 square foot homes, asking a different question wouldn't be a bad idea.

Light Bright

This year, our neighbor hung blue holiday lights. They make for a dim and melancholy trip to our bathroom. They glow vaguely through the frosted plastic covering the bottom half of our constantly weeping windows. In the mirror, the streetlight burns a lurid and lonely orange. Though it surprises me every time I open the door, I still like it. Christmas lights and fireflies, stars seen from the middle of the forest and tiny midwest towns seen from a red-eye flight. I've always been a sucker for a dash of bright in the middle of the dark.

I've lost my fictional way again while lying under the weather for the last week, while trying on Ohio for a few thank-filled days. I will find it. As I round the corner of the month I plan to pick a path, probably a new one and see where it goes. My 50,000 words for Nanowrimo will not be met but that's okay. It was a good experience to get to about 35,000 and feel the momentum of language building on a daily basis. I'm back at home, my head is clearing and I'm ready to do it all over again.

Artistic Voyeuristic

Other than a year-long stint in Boston, I've never lived in a dense urban environment. In Boston, I lived in a tiny dorm room on the top floor of a brownstone. From the single bay window, I looked out at the buildings of M.I.T., the Charles River, and the rush of traffic on Storrow Drive. While the view was brilliant, it was an unpeopled landscape, not a portrait. All the windows were too far away, the cars too quick.

Moving to Portland, I fell in love with a different kind of city living, one that made space for porches and gardens and wide sprawling parks. Out my office window now, I get a much more mundane view of my neighbor's patio with its card table, TV and left over football party beer cans. While washing dishes in my kitchen, I see the retired longshoreman in the house next door washing his dishes or watching TV and paying his bills. From my porch, I watch a girl with tattooed arms on the steps of her porch, smoking and watching me.

A certain amount of voyeurism seems commonplace in any urban setting, whether your view is of twenty floors of brick and glass or a single well-lit bungalow. For some reason, the curtains remain open. The lives remain on view. And who am I to turn away?

I was excited to see that a real photographer has gone out and done the project I've always imagined doing. Gail Albert Halaban has created Out My Window, NYC. They are luscious, lonely and yet comforting photos of New Yorkers and their views. Yesterday, the New York Times wrote about her and other Window Watchers. While I'll always prefer my Portland view, it made me long for all the well-lit windows New Yorkers get in a single glance.

Katahdin, not just a big mountain.

This is the bear from the movie Prophecy, our Halloween movie pic. She had the misfortune of being mutated by toxins from a paper mill in upstate Maine. Now imagine being a young boy of about 8 who lives in upstate Maine. Your rather clueless father takes you to the drive in and there she is, the slimy mutant bear who leaps from the woods and tears her victims to pieces. Funny, those woods look an awful lot like the woods along the road you live on. The next day, you decide to stay home and not bike to your friend's house down the street. You may never bike down your street again.

I will now blame Katahdin, the bear's name (and also Maine's highest peak) for, well, everything. I blame her for everything. She doesn't look very happy about that, but I live in Oregon and there are no paper mills here, right?

Six hours and 3,466 words later

I wouldn't call my first day of Nanowrimo full of flow unless it was a flow of sticky honey. Still, I took the free hours and made a good show of it, pushing through to my first pile of words. I flailed around in the first paragraph for way too long and then eventually found a way in. The way in wasn't this photo, but when I found this photo on my computer this morning, I see that it will be today's portal.

So already, I find lesson one, which of course is a lesson I already know: Be open. Be receptive to the world's bright and brassy cues, as well as to its rhythms and subconscious ripples. I'd lost touch with this kind of openness with the work on my first novel, the plodding and plodding and plotting and plotting. The fun part is looking (but not looking) for connections and patterns in my life and my character's lives. The grind I'd made of my writing life simply wore out anything loose and ephemeral. Now I have a chance to get that back. Eyes open, but slightly lowered. Brain alert, but slightly dreamy.

All happiness depends on courage and work, or so says Balzac

All art demands imagination. All art is imagination. But how do we learn to trust the fantastic beauty and grim monsters of our minds? How do we learn to listen? How do we leap from the well-defined lines of our daily lives up into the ether?

It feels like my own imagination is ossifying. What was once flexible and willing is now stiff as bone. It makes no sense to write fiction in this kind of state. But I want to write fiction. I don't know what else to do with the world.

In the next week, before I begin my novel-writing escapade, I need to find that crazy, magic potion that will reverse the effects of too many years of over-editing. Too many days given over to drudgery and easy numbness.

On some level, I worry that I will lose my sense of balance. I wonder if it's possible for me to write a worthwhile story without abandoning that balance altogether. So add to that magic potion something for my courage. Or maybe that's the whole of it. Courage and more courage. Gotta go get me some of that.

I'm signed up for Nanowrimo. The goal is to write a novel (or 50,000 words) in one month. My personal goal will be to prevent a nasty ear-biting bar brawl with my own psyche. I like to edit and fuss. I like to stop and savor the three lovely sentences I've written then pat myself on the back for a hard day's work. Keeping that instinct at bay is going to be hard. Very hard.

The last few months of writing have been painfully slow. If I'm going to tap into the flow of swift and heavily flawed prose, then I'm going to have to get in shape, grab a few books and do some arm curls. Jack LaLane, show me the way.

Fire Cupping

This isn't torture or magic or performance art. This is a little glass globe fixed to my arm with the power of suction. This is ancient medicine, as old as the instinct to suck your finger after you've knocked it against something. No pain is involved. In fact, it feels good, the way stretching feels good.

I wouldn't have thought this odd, sometimes brutal looking technique would appeal to me. The tissue pulls up into the cup and can turn pink, red, dark purple. Sometimes this coloring stays as a mark on the skin where matter once trapped in the tissues is drawn to the surface. Not a painful bruise, just a mark.

I wouldn't have thought that I'd want to fuss with the accoutrements of this technique. Cups, cotton, forceps, alcohol, water, oil. Oh, and fire. A big wad of fire to create the vacuum inside the cup.

But I love cupping. I love how it feels as a practitioner. I've spent my whole career pressing down into muscles. This lets me lift. And as a recipient of cupping I also feel lifted, as if all the stuck layers were slowly peeling apart, the detritus of my tissue finally tossed to the curb.

Now the hard part: Convincing my clients to let me use this technique on them. Medieval torture comes to their minds or they look longingly, beyond the row of cups, toward the dark, polished stones heating to a perfectly toasty temperature in their crockpot. I don't want to resort to telling them cupping helps the appearance of cellulite. While that might be alluring for certain clientele, I refuse to be the woman who sticks glass cups to people's butts.

Mimosa. Mi. Mo. Sa. Flowers like fans. Leaves like feathers. A scent like an old girlfriend's perfume: Faded and potent, dazzling and elusive. Mimosa, mimosa, mimosa.

I spent the weekend in Bend, OR attending a workshop on massage cupping (more on that in a post to come). While only three hours away, I'd never been. A funny little city, dotted with new condos and office buildings and crisp green parks. A certain Disney-esque feel permeated the downtown area where I spent most of my time. Even the beautiful trail along the Deschutes River that runs through town felt suspiciously manicured, the vacation homes on the ridge above the trail only half-hidden. It was all very...nice.

To be fair, however, the dry climate this area offers has never been my favorite. Even as I snapped away, photo after photo, of the amazing blue-green water and the crisp candy sky, I remained largely unmoved. Not that I didn't long to take a dip in the river or scrabble along the rocks, but I never felt that soothing rush I get when I step onto the beach or into a damp green forest. As I left the desert behind on my way home and entered the Mt. Hood National Forest I may have actually sighed.

It's good to see new landscapes if only to confirm that you've chosen the right one.

Because my beloved cat is gravely ill and because I have had to tend to her like a child–feeding her then wiping the food spilled from her clumsy mouth, carrying her to comfortable spots and whispering sweet wishes into her fur–I want pictures of dahlias instead.

Because I had to go to my client's house after she returned from a serious hospital emergency and sit at her bedside and try to make the noise behind her eyes quiet to something reasonable, I want dahlias.

Because my beaux is on the other side of the country trying to survive the survivors of his family– their indifference sticking to the tar-filled air– I want giant pink flowers the size of plates and multicolored pom-poms bursting out at the edge of Fall in one last hurrah.

Hurrah. It's good to be on this side of the dirt.

Spell to Be Said UponDeparture

by Jane Hirshfield

What had come here to do

having finished,

shelves of the water lie flat.

Copper the leaves of the doorsill,

yellow and falling.

Scarlet the bird that is singing.

Vanished the labor, here walls are.

Completed the asking.

Loosing the birds there is water.

Having eaten the pears.

Having eaten

the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples.

Table be strewn.

Table be strewn with stems,

table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure.

Table be strewn with pleasure,

what was here to be done having finished.

The Dining Room Debate

I won't idealize dinnertime with my family when I was growing up, but this is what it was: Mom, Dad, sister, and me all in our places around the dining room table in our high back chairs with the classical radio station playing in the background. Almost every night I begged to have dinner in front of the TV. 90% of the time I was denied. Most of my time around that table was spent shoveling my well-balanced meal into my mouth as quickly as possible and trying to make a quick retreat. My parents usually talked about their work which I didn't understand or their friends who I didn't know. My sister and I would have to talk about what we did in school. I was often bored.

But then there were nights, more and more of them as I got older, when questions were asked and not a single quick answer came back. Instead, we debated. We talked about religion and god. We talked about charity. We talked about human rights and animal rights. We talked about war. I remember being frustrated because I often felt like I lost these debates. My father and I would inevitably line up on opposite sides and my position would suffer horribly under my young, naive hands. Sometimes I got really mad and my mother would swoop in and join my cause whether she agreed with me or not.

I think back on those nights now and remember them (in my usual hazy way) as key moments in learning how to be a good person. More than any lecture from a teacher or chapter in a textbook, those debates truly educated me. The subjects were big and important, but the truly essential part of these evenings was how I learned to listen and think. Not to listen to the sound of my own wonderful voice, but to the ideas and possibilities of another person's mind. Not to think like my father but to think on my own.

These days, with all the screaming on the radio and cable TV, all the knee-jerk fear and thoughtless anger, I find myself longing for civility. I want the whole country to have to sit down with my father every night for a few weeks and learn how to question their own beliefs and then defend them through polite conversation. My mother can be at the table too. She'll tell everyone to stop slouching and to slow down and take a goddamn breath.

While on vacation with my folks, I shared the following thought: I wouldn't mind retiring and living in a trailer, preferably working as the host of some sweet little campground in the summer and parked on some warm patch of land in the winter.

My parents thought this was hysterical and from then on I couldn't get them to stop pointing at RVs and trailer parks and saying "How 'bout that one?"

They think I'm joking in the way that I used to joke in high school about getting married in full disco regalia at a HoJos off some random interstate. They were 95% sure I would never do it. At the time, I was only 75% sure myself. I didn't want to get married and thought if for some reason I had to, I'd want to make it perfectly silly. They thought I'd grow out of this, but I'm still pretty sure that if I had to have a wedding everyone would be in gorilla suits.

I'm also pretty sure that if I needed a cheap place to live in my old age, I'd be happy living in a trailer. I'm feeling about 50/50 on it, to be honest. I like the idea of incorporating the landscape more thoroughly into my living space. I like the idea of small. And let's face it, Airstream trailers are just really fucking cool, particularly the one above that they made in conjunction with Design Within Reach. Of course, I'd have to buy a car to haul it and that kind of sucks.

I hope to get up to Seaview, WA soon to do a little retreat at the Trailer Classics Hodgepodge (or TCH!-TCH!) to test out my trailer mettle. I'll be sure to report back.