A package (or four) in the mail

All four of these volumes came in the mail today: Matt Debenham's The Book of Right and Wrong, Hayden Saunier's Tips for Domestic Travel, Damian Rogers' Paper Radio and the latest issue of Blue Mesa Review. The fact that I pulled this mighty stack of literature from my mailbox all at once made me nervous at first. It seemed likely that all these beautifully bound words were going to fill me with petty jealousy or at least tug me deeper into the shallow but stinky pit of crankiness I've been sitting in lately. Here was a trio of books written by people who were at the Bennington Writing Seminars at the same time I was and alongside them, a lit journal I received for losing a fiction contest.

I sat on my porch, undoing the books from their wrappings and waited for the sick trickle of envy. Instead, I found my mood shifting. As I opened each book and read the first page, the first poems, I was genuinely moved. It wasn't because my friends had been published, but because the words were so good. No shit, I'm not just saying that. These are some talented people and how can I not be soothed and cheered by a bit of fine writing? A big thank you to them all.

OMG Tinkers won the Pulitzer!

I'm so thrilled that Paul Harding's Tinkers has won the Pulitzer Prize. It gives me hope that a debut novel from a small, specialized independent press (Bellevue Literary Press) can get this kind of attention. At a time when the records of our lives are regularly trimmed to a 140 characters or less and the "like" button is all we have to hit to feel like we've connected, Tinkers offers an alternative of long, luscious sentences and a beautifully odd structure. I highly recommend it as a cure for too many self-involved status updates.

"He thought, Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas."

Done

I'm done. The book is done. The file is saved in a dozen different places. The words are fixed. It feels less strange than I thought it would. As the end neared, I procrastinated a bit, not wanting to seal this world up for good. Not wanting to resign my characters once and for all to the fates I'd chosen for them. But overall, it was anticlimactic.

I've written this book half a dozen times, at least. With each earlier draft, I felt great joy and relief for my accomplishments. This time, I simply feel done. The cement has dried. It feels less like an accomplishment and more like a simple fact. I'm 5'10", have brown hair, and wrote a novel.

The state of publishing today is daunting to say the least. The long, hard trial of trying to find a place in the world for my story brings a sickening swell to my stomach. I can't imagine NOT trying, but I'm also weighing how much of my life I'll allow to be consumed by the process. It's a good story. I've worked very very hard at it. All I can do is hope for a little luck.

With that, I close my eyes and start dreaming into my next project.

Sharing

I breath, not a sigh, but a giant exhalation of relief. For the last ten days we've been hosting a guest who has now left. My house is returned to me, with all its dusty corners and sweet, forgotten surprises, like this bouquet of euphorbia that's been sitting ignored in my front window. Now I can take photos of it without being questioned about my photography habits or my gardening habits. I no longer have to share my thoughts or my space.

I've been reminding myself repeatedly throughout our guest's stay, just how lucky we are. Ten days with an old acquaintance should be considered a gift, a chance to learn something new. We have plenty of room to share. We have plenty of food. But what about people who have to take in refugee relatives? What about people who have never known a couple square feet of private space?

I wonder if my love of solitude is something I was born with or if it's at least partially a product of having grown up with my own bedroom, a wide backyard and a sister who was equally uninterested in my company as I was with hers. Is there anyone in the insanely crowded cities of India or China who have the same hermetic longings but are forced to always share, to be perpetually in the presence of others? There are ways to adapt, I suppose. I'm just thankful that I don't need to find out what those are. Not yet, at least.

I'd been wanting to see Jane Campion's movie Bright Star, so when I realized this month's Poetry x 12 challenge was to read a poetry collection by a poet featured in a movie, it seemed like the obvious, if not downright lazy choice. All I knew about Bright Star was that it was by Campion, who's made some truly great movies, and that it was a love story about a poet. For some reason I thought it was about W.B. Yeats and Maude Gonne. Of course, in an instant of turning on the movie, I realized these were not Irish Nationalists at the turn of the century. This was Keats and Fanny Brawne. Oh dear.

I've never been a fan of the Romantics. I distinctly missed out on studying with the best English Prof. at my college because he taught Shelly and Byron and Keats. I couldn't stomach it. But that was twenty years ago. Maybe Keats and I could come to better terms via the silver screen.

It is a beautifully filmed movie. And in this case, the beauty of each and every shot, is not just a bit of tasty frosting, but what the movie is about. I can still feel the breeze rolling in through that window, fluttering across her skirt. Aaaaah.

Scrawny, sickly Keats (who could easily have been plucked out of a Portland bar, stripped of his ironic t-shirt and made to memorize the lines) says this to Fanny when she first feigns an interest in poetry: "A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it's to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."

Good advice in general, and in particular with the Romantics. When I pulled out my giant, tattered copy of Norton's English Literature and flipped through the thin pages to the section on Keats I tried to keep this advice in mind, but still, I failed. I could barely get through a single Ode. It wasn't until I looked up some very oddly animated videos of Keats poetry that I was able to begin luxuriating (with my eyes closed...the videos creeped me out). Without trying to follow the meaning or understand the philosophy I fell into the rhythms of the language, soothed by them like a lullaby. Of course, lullabies are really good at putting me to sleep.

So much for this month's challenge. Now who's going to make that Yeats movie? That I really want to see.

Camera Supplies. Myrtlewood. Souvenirs.

Last week, I took the train to Seattle. As wary as I was of this notoriously tardy stretch of Amtrak, it was hard for me to pass up a few hours of swaying through the scenery. I love the faded glory of the old train stations. I love the graffiti-slashed walls nobody's supposed to see. I love the brambled woods that open onto a brilliant stretch of dark blue harbor. As long as the train is moving, I feel as though I could sit forever and watch the world pass this way. Something about the train rhythm and the train view syncs perfectly with my brain's rhythms and thoughts: Not dwelling, but seeing and smiling and moving on. Over and over and over.

The Other Grandmother

Last week I received a short video my sister made for her students who were doing a digital storytelling project. The subject was my paternal grandmother, a strong, bright mystery of a woman. As my sister explains in the video, my grandmother was her role model, the woman she most longed to be. My sister became an archeologist just like my grandmother, traveling the world to dig around in small plots of strange dirt.

I'm sure I've pulled out the same grandmother myself in more than one school essay. She was the easy one to spotlight as wild and unique. She had impossibly long dark hair that she secreted up into a bun every morning. She married and divorced the same man twice. She lived in Saudi Arabia for 20 years and rose above the ranks of the "pot pickers" to become a published archeologist.

But what about the other grandmother? She was the American born daughter of two Italian immigrants. She lived in the Bay Area for 95 years, worked in a ketchup factory, married young and raised three daughters. At the age of 55 she moved into a retirement community and made us biscotti every Christmas. Instead of ancient desert treasures, she collected crystal figurines. Instead of escaping to exotic landscapes she traveled almost exclusively to bask in the warmth of her family.

I've never really had one person, or even a series of people, that filled me with awe and ambition. My influences have always been subtle and largely undefined. But in light of my sister's project, I need to give my maternal grandmother a hardy nod. She was the person who defended me against my mother's temper, the one who, at 96, continues to love her late husband claiming (over and over) that she was happy to have him for 40 good years. Not a great intellectual, but a great lover of family and friends. The one who kept my photo on top of her TV and never fails to show her love to those who deserve it.

Dioramas and so much more

The February challenge for Poetry x 12 (now being administered by Joseph Harker) was to read a collection recommended by somebody else. I took up Amy Gerstler's Dearest Creature recommended by Deb at Stoney Moss. I forgot about writing something up for this challenge and have now returned the book to the library, but here are a few random thoughts:

This was such a different experience from the A.R. Ammons collection I read the month before. Reading this collection felt like hanging out with the cool kid, not the pretty popular girl, but the one who's really smart and sexy and just a little devious. Funny because the first poem is a letter to a young girl welcoming her into the ranks of the nerds. Well, if that's the case then Gerstler's my kind of nerd.

Fun and funny and poignant, I really enjoyed these poems. I didn't swoon with the language the way I did with a few of Ammons' pieces, but they delivered their punch. Plus there's a diorama on the cover and every good nerd knows how cool dioramas are!

Why I Love Portland: A brief list

• Because this was what the sky offered me at 6:20 last night.
• Because my neighbors seems to own no curtains though they do own chickens that are housed in their front yard.
• Because this is February and rather than being crushed by the weight of winter, I'm tripping on the sidewalk while looking up at the spring blooms.

February 21st

Sweet air. I stand beneath these early blooms and inhale and inhale. If I take enough of that gentle scent into my lungs, maybe some of the heaviness there will dissipate. The hard, bitter ball of winter starts to soften. In the afternoon, my cat uses a tuft of ornamental grass as a pillow. I dig into the soft bed of dirt beside her, uncovering worms and the earth's cool breath. Gloom sulks along the sidelines under this kind of blue, under this kind of persistence. Here I am again...SPRING... Spring...spring.

Routine vs. Ritual

This is the feast of a hundred take-out containers, otherwise known as our friend's Chinese New Year party. 2010 is the Year of the Tiger, a year predicted (by who? the stars? the tigers?) to be full of change and upheaval. That doesn't mean we had to go and mess with tradition straight out of the gate. Instead, we did what we always do: pick up a little take out from the Thai/Vietnamese/Chinese restaurant of our choice and head on over for some serious snacking, imbibing and firework displays.

I know I've missed a couple of these parties over the years, but compared to all the other traditions in my life, this is probably the most consistent. Christmas varies wildly from year to year depending on where I am. Thanksgiving suffers from the same randomness. Today's Valentine's Day but I honestly don't give a flying fuck. What else is there? Sean used to cook breakfast for a large gathering of friends every year on his birthday, until he realized how much work this was. Then he switched to watching movies in the backyard but that tradition's been thrown off course too. We never celebrate anniversaries, solstices, St. Patrick's Day or any of the days of the lord (or any other deities for that matter).

My father used to insist that we all NEED traditions either ones that are handed down or ones we create ourselves. He thought regular celebration was an important way to mark time and take note of our lives. In many ways, this makes sense to me and yet anytime I participate in a tradition part of me feels a little odd. There's no way to remove the inherent sense of obligation. Even in the most benign, most loving celebrations, I'm aware of the coercion as much as the comfort.

Maybe this is a result of being forced to go to church for much of my youth. Or it could be a lingering remnant of my teenage personae that reveled in opposition. Maybe I just want to believe that small daily celebrations can be enough. Every morning, Sean makes breakfast while I make coffee. Almost every day I walk within the 10 square blocks surrounding my house to go to the library, the bank, the grocery store (for a loaf of bread, a container of milk and a stick of butter). We regularly take time to confuse the cat and then, at night, we sit on the couch and eat dinner. These are routines, but to me they're as beautiful as any ritual.

Go. Outside. Now.

Here we are in the first week of February and we are lucky enough in this little damp patch of the world to be experiencing the first shy signals of an early spring. A gorgeous park full of lush greenery and sweeping views sits 10 blocks to the east of me. There's no reason I'm not up there every day. There's no reason why, after 16+ years in this drizzly climate that a little rain spittle or a dash of cool air should stop me from getting the hell out of my house (except for the fact that I still don't own a proper raincoat or a working umbrella at the moment...how could this be?).

Last week I had a client bemoaning the passing of her 25th birthday. I barely stifled a laugh. I try to remember that someday I'll be wishing I was 40. Every time I head out into the world to run errands or enjoy the sweet mossy goodness of our little city I remember to take note of the swing of my arms and the slap of my feet. Take note of the ease of it. Don't squander the seemingly simple ability to walk down the street and carry home your groceries.

Poetry x 12: A.R. Ammons

As part of Dana Guthrie Martin's Poetry x 12 challenge for January, I read A.R. Ammons' Uplands, published in 1970. My poetry knowledge is sparse, so comparing this book to those of its day and with what is being written today isn't something I can really do. I picked the book from the list on Wikipedia. Some heavy hitters were publishing that year: Ashbery, Brooks, Strand, Merwin, to name just a few that I recognized. Why Ammons then? Well, it was available at my library and I'd never read anything by him. And so I dug in:

Semicolons. Lots and lots of semicolons. Apparently, this was Ammons' signature piece of punctuation. They don't dominate every poem in this collection, but they play a strong role in giving the work a sense of continuous flow. My nature is to follow punctuation rules, as if my grade school teacher were looming over me with a ruler ready to swat my knuckles. It's always a pleasure then, to read a writer who has taken control of the punctuation and made it work for him. Prose so rarely lends itself to this kind of manipulation and so, again, another pleasure.

Nature is everywhere in these poems. Not a static description of it, but rather a dynamic view where change is inevitable.With a few exceptions, they felt very contemporary and I continually forgot that these were written 40 years ago. This is what I read on the Poetry Foundation's page on Ammons which perfectly sums up what I liked about his work:

"Ammons rehearses a marginal, a transitional experience[;] he is a literalist [sic] of the imagination because the shore, the beach, or the coastal creek is not a place but an event, a transaction where land and water create and destroy each other, where life and death are exchanged, where shape and chaos are won and lost." -Richard Howard.

Here are a few of my favorite lines, the final stanzas of "Conserving the Magnitude of Uselessness"

for the inexcusable (the worthless abundant) the
merely tiresome, the obviously unimprovable,
to these and for these and for their undiminishment
the poets will yelp and hoot forever

probably,
rank as weeks themselves and just as abandoned:
nothing useful is of lasting value:
dry wind only is still talking among the oldest stones.

Reprieve

The sun is out in full force, pulling the first daphne from bud to bloom. I have a couple days of beach time under my belt. The state passed two important tax measures that should help keep us all afloat, clinging to our little soap-sliver of hope. Apparently the Abyss allows day trips to slightly brighter locales.

The abyss is lovely, come on in!

If ever I look back on the entries in this blog let it be known that January 2010 was when the last shred of hope I had for this country was torn in two. I still have a shred, but it's half the size. I barely even feel it there beneath my first rib.

First came the 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. Every morning there were new pictures of the dead being lifted unceremoniously into dumptrucks, the desperate sleeping amongst the rubble. Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh exceeded my expectations for how hateful and cruel people could be while pretending to be concerned.

Then Ted Kennedy's senate seat went to a Republican who pretended to be "for the people" and talked a lot about his old truck. Slick as shit and stinky as shit too. The next day, Obama was talking about slowing down the push for health care. The stink wafted over and continues to linger.

This morning the Supreme Court ruled to allow corporations the ability to donate freely and widely to political campaigns. I can barely allow myself to think about this or I might scream.

Next Tuesday, Oregon votes on whether to raise the minimum corporate tax (so that companies like Portland General Electric pay more than their current $10) and raise income tax on individuals making more than $125,000. I fear disaster and my ratty shred of hope won't do much good when I go to sop up all my tears.

Damn. Bad week.

At least the sun came out today. I opened the front window a crack and sat squinting in the light as I wrote.

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.