Vote for a life less scary...

Carve your own pumpkin

Happy Halloween

Windstorm & Bart, He's Establishing Mood. . .

Notes from a Small Town--

We had a windstorm last night and most of our town lost power. We didn't, which was odd. Normally, someone just needs to sneeze and we lose power. This morning I went for a walk and much of the neighborhood smelled like Christmas, huge branches of pine trees scattered across the road. There was even frost this morning on the pumpkins and hay. Coming home, it looked as if the mountains received their first dusting of snow. Towards the islands, I could see a fog bank dropped between land. But above, the sky was that perfect blue autumn sky with the hint of winter, the hint that things are changing. I watched the seagulls circle the crown of fishing boats across the water. The ferry docked then returned to its path from here to there from there to here.

Poetry--
Remember to read Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven tonight or tomorrow in celebration of Halloween. Or watch the The Simpsons version of The Raven, which has one of my very favorite lines from Bart when he asks, "Do you know what would have been scarier than nothing?"

Seasonal Gratitude Journal

1. People who decorate for Halloween
2. Pumpkins
3. It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown (I got a rock.)
4. Red, yellow, orange leaves
5. Trick or treaters
6. Day of the Dead
7. Ghost stories
8. Spooky music
9. Owls
10. Bare trees against a dusk sky

Halloween & Life As it Is

Dreamweaver--
All my thoughts have been about Halloween recently. I even had a dream I was walking down the waterfront and everyone was in costume. I wish I could remember more specifics. These have been my dreams lately.

Achy Breaky Arms--
We carved our pumpkin on Thursday and sadly, my arms still hurt from cleaning out two pumpkins. I had thought it *might* be from my Wednesday yoga class, but I know better. This is quite sad when you get a "workout" carving pumpkin. Our three pumpkins were in these styles: Classic, Cat, and Experimental.

What's on my desk--
Late Wife by Claudian Emerson
They Used to Call Me Snow White...but I Drifted: Women's Strategic Use of Humor
One Hundred Steps from Shore by Jenifer Lawrence (a new poetry book published by Blue Begonia Press to check out!)
Best American Poetry 2006
First Hand by Linda Bierds

Worst or Best Halloween Costume?

Crescent Moon

Show Me the Funny Ladies...

You know, I've been annoyed with the National Book Awards the last 2 years for the number of poetry books by women that have been represented. Out of 10 books, one was by a woman. I don't like to think this way, to sort things out by gender, but it's been quite noticeable to me lately.

Maybe because of my research paper, it's been difficult finding articles or books on humorous women poets or writers, there are always so many more men listed. When I ask people who are your favorite poets that use humor, the list is mostly male: Billy Collins, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, Dean Young, Thomas Lux.

This is what's on my mind tonight. This and the perfect crescent moon outside my window.

Called Back--

Just in time for Halloween:

From the Academy of America Poets:

List of Poet's gravesites

List of graves of International Poets

Me too.

You go, Laura!




Happy Halloween

Singing & Bodies

A Walk in the World--
Today on my walk, I heard singing. As I walked closer, past the farm and the forest, there were two men building a house. From their pick-up, an old song from The Outfield (Josie's on a vacation far away...) I was amazed at how well they sounded with their voices echoing off the evergreens and mountains. They didn't see me as I passed and I imagined their world of nails and wood must be like my writing world where I move almost (if not) into a meditative state and the world continues on

What I'm Reading--
Writing Like a Woman (Poets on Poetry) by Alicia Ostriker. Published a while ago, but still relevant. One interesting idea is how women write about their bodies. As a young poet, she said an older male poet was put-off by this in her poems. As girls, our bodies are something that can't be ignored. Monthly, they must be listened to. As we get older, we have to be aware of what they are doing if we want to or don't want to become pregnant. Once pregnant they do incredible things, they create a cocoon to hold life and for nine months, they live with two heartbeats.

Having just read Kinky by Denise Duhamel, I've been thinking about how we have these fantastic bodies and some choose to stuff them with silicone, to put poison about their brows, to cut and move skin higher, tighter. After my daughter was born, I remember thinking I can only praise my body from this point on. How do we become so confused to think that we are more beautiful when we are artificial?

And I'm not saying, don't wear make-up or wear flattering clothes, the black spaghetti-strap dress with stilettos. What I'm saying is, everyone doesn't have to look like a Barbie doll, we don't need bland beauty of perfect noses, big eyes, or a certain cup size. We don't need to all be of the same mold, and that's the concern. A few weeks ago, Dirty dancing was on TV and I thought about Jennifer Grey having her nose done. I can't recognize here anymore, she just one of many.
I guess I'm concerned how easy it is to think we're not each perfect as we are, that the nose job, the liposuction, the puffy lips will somehow change things, that your problems won't be your problems if only you had the right face, the right smile, the right size jeans.

Top Cat

Some new things we've recently brought into our home--a tadpole, and a Venus flytrap plant. The Venus Flytraps remind me so much of the 70's, I keep thinking we'll have some magic Mexican jumping beans on the table soon. The tadpole's name is "Pumpkin" as I'm sure in the wild, mommy frogs name their baby frogs as well.

I received the new Poets and Writers and the cover reminds me of that line from Seinfeld where the art collector says: He is a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away. I don't think it's meant to be and maybe I'm the only one who feels this way, but it is one of the strangest covers I've seen from them. It reminds me of the hitchhiking ghost from the Haunted Mansion.

I sometimes get that nervous feeling when I see poets in fancy hats. It's that strange laughter that happens when I look in the mirror and see I've spent all day with a dollop of chocolate on my nose. And no one told me how silly I looked and yet, there I was. How does the rest of the world "see" poets? Are we the oddballs bathing our cats and dressing them up in bonnets or more the fellow wandering the cemetery with a butterfly net?

I'm still trying to find my fancy hat in life. I should be thankful that some poets already know where their hat is and aren't afraid to wear it.

Miss Edna

Poet lost years of work in Sanibel fire
By Glenn Miller
Originally posted on October 20, 2006



Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who vacationed on Sanibel Island with her husband, Eugen Boissevain.

A distressing moment for one of America's premier poets burst into her life with a fiery flash on a warm spring evening 70 years ago as she and her husband walked along a Sanibel Island beach. The date was May 2, 1936. The high temperature that day was 87. It was a Saturday.

The island was quiet, warm and serene. That was about to change — at least the quiet and serene part.

Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband, Eugen Boissevain, had taken a ferry from Punta Rassa. Maybe they came over on The Gladys, a ferry operated by the Kinzie Brothers Steamer Line. This was 27 years before the first bridge to the island was stretched across San Carlos Bay. Only about 200 people lived on Sanibel. Edna and Eugen checked in to the Sanibel Palms Hotel, not far from the ferry landing on the 12-mile island's east end.

At the time, Millay was one of America's most famous women. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, in 1923. She read her poems on national radio hook-ups in the days before television.

"Back in her time she was better known than any poet is known today by the mainstream public," said Dr. Jim Brock, a Florida Gulf Coast University associate professor of English.

Edna and Eugen dropped off their luggage, according to an account in "Savage Beauty," the 2001 biography of the poet by Nancy Milford.

As they started their walk, Eugen returned to the car and fetched Edna's one and only manuscript copy of "Conversation at Midnight." He dropped it off with the rest of their luggage and the couple continued their walk, scanning the sand for seashells, perhaps glancing across the way at Fort Myers Beach.

At one point, they turned around. The hotel was in flames. Everything, according to Milford's account and a News-Press report from 1936, was lost. That included the manuscript, Edna's 17th century copy of poems by Catullus, an ancient Roman poet, and an emerald ring.

Sam Bailey, now 82, was a 12-year-old boy living on Sanibel in 1936. He can still, sort of, recall the fire and famous poet.

"Vaguely," said Bailey, a member of a family that has been on the island since the 1890s. "I didn't really see it until after it was burning. I don't know why. I can't remember where I was."

Well, it was 70 years ago. ...

A 1929 Ford A coupe was advertised for sale for $98 at Forehand Tire Co., 2210 Jackson St. in Fort Myers. Al Jolson's "The Singing Kid" was playing in the Arcade Theater in downtown Fort Myers. Sunshine Markets, the "stores of personal service" on Hendry Street, was advertising a four-pound carton of lard for 50 cents. Savvy shoppers could snag eight pounds of lard for 95 cents! A large package of Rinso was on sale for 23 cents.

A big story in the May 3, 1936, paper may have foreshadowed the 2006 movie "Snakes on a Plane": A News-Press front-page headline that third day of May was "Loose snakes capture car." The newspaper reported that snakes got loose on the express car of a train from Fort Lauderdale to Detroit.

Lower on the front page May 3, 1936, was this headline: "Fire Razes Palms Hotel at Sanibel."

This is what the paper reported: "The Palms Hotel, owned and operated by Mr. and Mrs. Webb Shanahan, on Sanibel Island burned to the ground last night in a fire which was started by an explosion of a kerosene heater on the second floor. ... It was reported that the Shanahans and their guests lost everything including clothing, personal effects and furniture."

Those losses included Edna St. Vincent Millay's only copy of "Conversation at Midnight," a long verse drama. Gone. Gone in a flash.

On May 4, 1936, in a follow-up story the newspaper reported on Millay's losses, referring to her as a "noted poetess."

Newspaper readers that day read this: "Among Miss Millay's losses were a large number of unpublished manuscripts. She had spent the past two years in preparing one of them."

"It was a major tragedy," Eugen wrote in a letter that was published in "Savage Beauty."

The definitive Millay biography has this note Edna wrote to a friend after the fire: "O, Florida, O, cold Florida! Could any state be horrida?"

The Poetess

Well, it could have been worse, of course. It could have, indeed, been "horrida."

This May 4 headline implied far worse: "Edna St. Vincent Millay Victim of Sanibel Blaze."

Millay wasn't injured, let alone killed. She and Eugen survived the blaze. They weren't in the hotel as it burned.

Perhaps the most famous words of Millay's writing career, from a poem titled "First Fig," presaged the blaze — sort of. In 1918, Millay published the following:

"My candle burns at both ends;

it will not last the night;

but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —

it gives a lovely light!"

That candle supplied a metaphorical flame. The flames on Sanibel on May 2, 1936, were all too real and not lovely. Although she lost the manuscript, Millay was able to rewrite "Conversation at Midnight" from memory.

"It's amazing that she could bring back any of it," Milford said in an interview.

Surely it wasn't easy, either coping with the blaze or re-writing the long drama. Milford said all of the poet's clothes were lost in the fire. Edna and Eugen then drove to their home in upstate New York. It was an unpleasant journey.

"She had this linen suit," Milford said. "By time she hit North Carolina, she was devastated and rumpled."

Sanibel oldtimers and local history buffs know about Millay and the blaze. Local author Randy Wayne White's most recent novel, "Dark Light," includes a look at Sanibel in the past and a reference to Millay. A character in the book, Arlis Futch, a crusty old Sanibel coot, offers this description of the poet:

"I met Mrs. Millay. She was nice. Smart, too, and she knew it, which wasn't considered polite for women in those days. That's probably why some folks gossiped about her. Not the locals — it was always outsiders. She liked her whiskey, that's what I heard. She liked men, too. Young ones. And girls. What they mostly talked about was her being a commie."

That description was read to Milford. She chuckled at the implication, albeit from a very old character in a work of fiction, that Millay was a communist.

"Certainly not a communist," Milford said.

Millay, though, was colorful and talented and alluring. Friends called her "Vincent."

"She was too beautiful to live among mortals," poet Richard Eberhardt wrote in a foreword to a collection of Millay poems published in 1991.

Many men were smitten during her life and even now, 56 years after her death in 1950 at 58.

"It's easy to fall in love with her," said Brock, the FGCU professor.

Sanibel Island resident Joe Pacheco is 76 and has admired Millay since his youth.

"I grew up on her poetry," Pacheco said. "When I was young, an adolescent, she was still the most famous of American poets. She was still the one we read in high school."

The hotel

When Edna and Eugen stepped off the ferry on that May day 70 years ago, they came to an island far different from the one we know today. Now, the area around the lighthouse is filled with evidence of the 21st century, with words of warning to tourists and locals posted on signs.

"Did you pay to park?"

“No feeding wild birds.”

“Non-resident fishing license required.”

“Live shelling prohibited.”

A sign by the boardwalk over dunes has 10 dos and don’ts. A city ordinance and a Florida Department of Environmental Protection rule are both quoted by number. In 1936, there were certainly no such signs on the island.

Francis Bailey, 85, grew up on Sanibel. When the fire engulfed the hotel, Bailey was 15 and away at Virginia Episcopal School, a boarding school in Lynchburg, Va. He remembers the hotel.

“It was the home of the Shanahans, Pearly Shanahan and Webb Shanahan,” Bailey said. “He was the mail carrier during my young life. His father was a lighthouse keeper prior to that. I don’t know where she came from. She had a beautiful voice and played organ at church.”

He also recalls they had daughters named Snooky and Lorraine. There was plenty of room on the island for poets and other tourists to wander around.

“It (the hotel) was set off by itself,” Bailey said.

The area near the lighthouse is now filled with condos and houses and hotels. At times, traffic may be as thick as mosquitoes were in the 1930s. Sanibel was an isolated, little-known place 70 years ago.

“We had a ferry,” Francis Bailey said. “We had a mailboat. We didn’t have any problems. I wish to hell it was that way now.”

Sam Bailey, three years younger than his brother, can still see the old Palms Hotel and the Shanahan family.

“They lived downstairs,” Sam Bailey said. “It was a big home and the Depression came on, everybody was trying to make a buck. There weren’t two hotels on the island at the time.”

Then the fire came to the two-story frame building. Whoosh! It didn’t take long.
“Old Florida pine,” Sam Bailey said of the wood used to build the hotel. “It’s just impossible to save anything.”

The hotel was lost. The manuscript was lost. Millay, though, reconstructed “Conversation at Midnight.”

Now, 70 years after the fire and 56 years since her death, Edna St. Vincent Millay is still remembered and her poems are still read, long after the ashes of the Palms Hotel began floating away on a warm spring evening.

The Co$t of Poetry

Last night I had a dream that my book was published by a press connected to "The Island of Lesvos/Lesbos." Now, I'm desperately wondering which press I'm supposed submit to?

I've been annoyed with poetry contests that change a $15 to submit 3 poems and have a prize of $150. Do the math, if 10 people enter, they break even. Sometimes, I can see the high price of vanity, of ego.

I think about the poetry world and try to figure out better ways than taking from the poets. I've always said, Give poetry books as gifts or hostess gifts. Sometimes I'm amazed how large and small the poetry audience, we are both enormous and insignificant.

This year, I'm being very thoughtful about where I send my manuscript. I'm not flooding the market in hopes of something. I'm considering the judge, would s/he like my work? Sometimes, it's hard to tell. Mostly, I've been checking my gut on this-- how would I feel if Press X published my work? I want to be excited and thrilled about the next book. I want the sash and the crown. Now, if I can just interpret my dream, I may be on the right track.

Thought for the night-- You're Going to Make it After All....

MTM

These Years of Magical Thinking

I began reading this book last night and am already at 70 pages into it. Today in the car I started explaining it to my mum and she said, "That feels like home." And it occurred to me that she just went through the same experience of losing her husband (my step-father) and her daughter (my oldest sister) all in one year.

In the book, the author doesn't want to throw away her husbands shoes because "he'll need shoes when he gets back." It's this unbelieving that he is dead. She is so honest with her thoughts and beliefs. When my father died just after I graduated college, I would pretend he was still alive in the house with my mum. A strange denial, a strange way to make it through the day.

Today I had lunch with my nana (94) , my aunt (84), and my mum. My aunt was telling me all this fascinating information about how our family came from France and how we ended up the US. Then in between our genealogy, there would be a story that always involved someone dying--the little girl who didn't want to cross the river, so they gave her an apple and when the boat capsized they found her drowned still clutching the apple. Sometimes, more than one person dying--three men who knocked on the door at night and a great great grandmother holding a musket out the door and killing them all. And tragedies. Tragic lives. And it occurred to me as another death was placed between the turkey wraps and the potato salad, that these are my family's favorite stories--what went wrong, who died, who lived a hard life.

And all my life I was told of the details--the brother swallowing a balloon, the father's heart attack, the young artist drawing a picture entitled "My Grave" and dying two weeks later in a freak accident. And it helped me today understand where my fear has grown from, why I'm fascinated with cemeteries, why I obsess about people dying, with how we leave this place, because I want to know the histories of the names in the headstones, the why & the how. Tell me, so I can make sure we're not there, we're not holding the apple in the river, we're nowhere near the front door.

Do Geese See God?

So you like palindromes? How do Weird Al and Bob Dylan come together in this world? Click here: BOB to find out.

The Ha Ha Hee Hee

Because I'm starting my critical paper on the use humor in poetry by women, I thought I'd ramble on what I've been thinking about.

First, in reading about men and women stand-up comedians and found this--

Comedian Kim Wayans observes:
with men they're [the audience] like eager and they're ready . . . to accept him and then he has to prove that he's not funny before they . . . back off . . . but with a woman you have to come out and you have to win them over.

I started to wonder about women poets, do readers assume they are going to be lyrical, confessional, or emotional before they read them and if so, does humor in women's poem seem unexpected? Personally, I'm around a lot of funny women poets, so I usually expect at least something in poem that offers a little giggle or maybe a twist of wit. But how does our culture perceive women who use humor in their work? Can they be taken as seriously as the men who use humor? Are they?

I'm most interested in risk a poet takes when using humor. I think one of the risks is that their poetry will seem "light." Billy Collins was known for his humor in poetry, then a backlash came about. Perhaps, there was some good reason for this as he began to be able to publish poems based on his name and not the poem. I think this allowed for some poems that weren't his best to be put out in the world, and the good poems that he was writing (and I do like his poetry, so yes, I believe he was still writing very good poems) they were mixed in there too, but not as noticeable.

Strong well-crafted humorous poems are hard to write because so much of humor is about timing and even if you are writing free verse, you still have the constraints of the form to consider. Imagine telling a joke using stanza and line breaks. I think this is one reason that prose poetry works so well to write humorously because you move away from having to creates perfect lines of poetry. You get a little wiggle room to tell the joke.

So, I'll wander onto my paper now. Only thirty more pages to go.

God is in the Music...

The Painting: Puck's Mischief

A Midsummer's Night Dream

As autumn continues and the holiday season begins to make itself known in the stores, I'm reminded how important it is to support each other as artists.

In our community we have Arts in the Wood, an event where you follow a map around the area and arrive at the studios of artists (some at their home, some in the town). This year for the holidays, I am planning of purchasing 85% of my gifts for people from working artists and writers. Instead of someone getting a vase from Pier 1, expect a beautiful handmade vase from the potter who lives down the street from me. Instead of a bestseller, expect a book of poems. Instead of a name-brand bracelet from Macy’s, expect a handblown glass beaded bracelet from the woman who creates art in her garage.

I am finding myself not wanting to give my money to large businesses or to people who already have it. I want to support the working artists of the world, the people who sell their art at the Farmer’s Markets or in the local galleries.

Recently, as a gift to myself, I purchased a painting I have been wanting for the last 8 years. It’s not something I’ve thought about on a daily basis, but I have thought about it over years after attended a poetry reading and gallery opening for the paintings 8 years ago. I had wanted to buy one then, but didn’t. About 3 weeks ago, I thought about the artist who painted the series and found her on the internet. And on whim, I sent her an email asking about her work and if she happened to have any of the paintings left from the Midsummer’s Night series. She did. All the others had been sold, but she had one left. And as serendipity would have it, it was the painting I wanted back then, but didn’t buy. And now, eight years later it hangs in my living room.

I think about these connections we make with others as writers either at poetry readings, on the internet, or at a writer’s conference. We don’t know what connections are being made at the time and if we’re having any impact at all, but yet, down the road, maybe 8 years from now, we may receive an email from someone. We may receive a compliment. Our lives are spreading out in front of us like tributaries in a river, or the opposite, one path opening into many and we don’t know what is ahead of us, we just move forward and trust.

Gratitude Journal

1. Fog
2. Online Radio
3. Reminders
4. Titles
5. Halloween
6. Pumpkins on the fence posts
7. Muesli
8. A Midsummer's Night Dream
9. Cats
10. Chai tea
11. Mail
12 Autumn
13. Moonrise
14. Books
15. Sunday mornings
16. Abundance
17. Scissors
18. Liberty apples
19. Choice
20. Intuition

How to Save a Manuscript

It's a foggy Monday morning. My cat is sleeping on my computer monitor. I'm listening to How To Save a Life by The Fray. I'm thinking about my manuscript, I imagine leaving it on someone's doorstep like a baby in a basket. I imagine someone finding it and saying, "Well, what do we have here." Or "Oh, honey." I imagine them naming it. I imagine the name being better than anything I could think of. And with that name, poems fall away, the face is more recognizable. Then I ask myself why can't I be the one to name it?

Until it named, it can't be completely formed. Without the title, the poems are a bouquet without a home-- a funeral or a graduation, on the kitchen counter in a beer bottle or in a crystal vase at the museum. I could name it How to Save a Life; I could name it Fiasco in Blue; I could name it Frank. I have stopped revising until the name is clear to me. It makes no sense to move poems, put in, take out poems, when the halo of the angel is out of focus.

I've been reading Frannie Lindsay's poems this morning from her new book, Lamb. Not many poems can make me cry. Not many people write from such a sincere place.

The Ewe Lamb
- 2 Samuel 12: 3

I raised my one ewe lamb
as a daughter, fed her
red clover, the last hearts
of my cabbage, offered
her inky lips my cup.
She rested her chin
on my neck at night,
her hoofs on my cloak,
her breathing
the wind on the waves
of sleep’s pure waters.
Sleep: an animal’s word
for bless: hoof of her heart
to the hoof of my heart.
The dusk before her slaughter
we walked together, pauper
and kin, over the meadow.
I sang to her, then
I unstrung the rusted bell
from her collar.

A stranger emailed me today about my peace broadsides and it had me thinking about our world, how peace is the alternative, not the norm. Oh humans, evolving at the speed of light technologically, but evolving in other ways...not so much.

The fog rolled in today. After a week of baby blue skies and nights of the orange-wedge moon (did you see it? amazing), fall is wrapping me up in batting. Speaking of batting, my husband was at a fire last night in a mattress factory. Firefighters carried flaming mattresses and batting. The images he told me about were a bit surreal, wet batting, beds of flames, and then a shooting a few blocks away only an hour earlier. The city was busy last night, getting ready for Friday the 13th...actually, the fire was at 2 a.m., so I guess it was the 13th.

I've returned to my original title, but yes, I've revised my mss a bit. It's now at 65 pages. What happened? It seemed to grow overnight.

Well, it's time to write. A couple hours before the time is pulled out from under me and the domestic goddess wakes up and puts on her apron.

I Must Revise My Revisions...

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. Paul Valery
I could say the same about a manuscript as well. I realized after sending out my mss today that I wanted to revise it again. I don't think it needs revising and in fact, I seem to be moving the same poems in and out or rearranging the order. It's almost a nervous tick. It's almost believing if I have the secret-decoder ring, they'll unlock the door again and let me in.

And here's the other thing, I'm not sold on my title. I understand the concept, the theme, the bigger meaning to my book, but I can't find the words that will add an electric charge to the book, create energy, tension, something, something, something. Yesterday in yoga I tried to conjure up a new title in savasana. This is the time in yoga when your mind is to be free from all thought and I'm running through the poems in my manuscript page by page and hoping for divine intervention. Nuthin'.

I was so certain I was finished. I was so certain the manuscript wouldn't be touched by me anymore. The manuscript is the danger zone, I'm Cyndi Lauper and I can't stop messing with it. Shebop.

Church of My Broken Mind

Good morning children of technology. I've been in my head a lot (maybe I've been brainwashed too comes to mind) and as I said, trying to reconnect with the world. I sent out my manuscripts this morning in a hopeful/nonhopeful way.

I had a bit of nervousness as I did as sometimes it feels as if I'm sending out part of my soul and asking strangers if they like how I've decorated my chakras. When we were at Goodwill there was a perfect new Virgin Mary costume. My mum said, "I cannot believe they have that. It's so inappropriate." My first thoughts, "Wouldn't it be funny to be a pregnant Virgin Mary?" (I even imagined a little pin that said “Oops, I did it again”).

My newest manuscript says "Jesus" a lot and not in a Mel Gibson's Passion sort of way. I sometimes worry that my humor will be seen as sacrilegious, but what I'm trying to do is wrap my head around something too big for me to understand, for anyone to understand, and then I get caught up in the "what will people say?" and the worries from rushing in.

But I guess ultimately, I will enter into the church of my life with my shoes on, but only in the best shoes. I know this goes against my poetry, as I do believe God or god, the universe, or spirit, some other divine power, energy, or whatever you want to call it moves through artists when we’re creating. There is a part of me that wants to think we’re not all connected, but I can see the threads during morning walks, in the spiderwebs, in the space between our books and poems. And it amazes me, it amazes how we create white space where there isn’t any.

Costumes...& Rich Poets/Poor Poets and Life with Reading Fees

I spent the morning at Goodwill looking for a Halloween costume. I went with an open mind, but with the hope of finding a good mechanic's shirt or bowling shirt. After a good hour, I wandered over the wedding dresses and there, mixed in with taffeta gowns and lace fiascos was a Bo Duke costume-- yellow cowboy shirt, blonde wig, cowboy hat, and Dukes of Hazzard belt buckle all for $12. YEEHAH!

I put down the scary renaissance dress I was holding and grabbed a 99 cent t-shirt that said "Sailors have more fun - go Navy" just because I liked the mermaid on it. I also bought a NY Yankees baseball jersey for $4 as I was debating as going as a baseball player (though I'm a huge Red Sox fan, my husband has a vintage Yankees cap I could wear). I decided my husband could wear the jersey, but it turns out it's too small for him, so it may be my costume next year.

Other than that, there's not been a lot of poetry going on. I've started submitting my mss, though I'm being much more particular to where I send it. I am shocked at the amount of reading fees these days and wondering if there is a better way to do things in the poetry world. I'm not anti-reading fee for contests, but $25 a pop? Plus paying for copies and postage.

To copy my mss at Kinko's today it came out to about $5.85 per manuscript. Plus postage. So, for me to submit one manuscript is about $33, $35 if I send Priority Mail. Or $100 to submit 3 manuscripts. It's a strange world, yet I find here I am choosing a contest and submitting my work to it. There a certain amount of vanity and egotism I see in myself as I prepare another manuscript. Why do I want (need?) another book? What am I trying to do? I'm not sure, yet I feel I need to send this book out.

I'm going to be thinking more about what inside me makes me want to publish a book of poems. Maybe there's a poem in that. Could poetry be an addiction?

Abundance & Something Good

Last night I lit Raven Wood Prosperity and Abundance incense as I'm trying to reconnect on a more spiritual level to a world I feel a bit out of lately. When I first moved to this small town, I was "in the flow" of things. The world was a synchronistic grab bag I could draw from at anytime. Doors didn't just open, they flew open with confetti and WELCOME signs. My life felt more connected at that time than any other. I had left my corporate job, tossed my nylons and high heels off the ferry (um, metaphorically) and moved into a world of simplicity. The Circle of Simplicity was my handbook as was the Artist Way.

It's been nine years since this grand awakening for me, moving from a structured (and a little more secure path) to an open road life as a working and practicing writer. Occasionally, I lose my way and fall off into the huckleberry bushes or catch my designer jeans on some blackberries. It's always about balance, the balance of the material world with the artist world for me and I constantly have to realign and find my place in both.

So, I've started to trying to add a little more ritual to my life, hence the incense. However, about halfway through the stick of incense I had this thought-- Holy Stinking Papers, Batman, my submissions are going to smell like hippie girl. Yes, this is my reconnection with spirit, I'm worried that my entire office now reeks of "abundance." And the next editor who reads my work is going to think I'm living in a commune with my patchouli oil and not shaving my legs. Okay, s/he probably won't think that, but there is the concern about the scent.
There's been a few times when I've received a used book I've purchased only to have it smell as if it was sitting in the booksellers musty basement for years. And once, I received a chapbook that smelled so terribly of cigarette smoke, I opened the envelope and immediately took it outside. Moths and spiders were passing out from the smell. I swear, there were ashes between the pages, a coffee stain on the back.

But I guess in the spiritual ritual life, one is not to worry about the details and maybe the incense will work like pheromones and instead of annoying the editor, they will be a magical turn-on like eating chocolate and not realizing why you are so happy.

But I keep having the feeling something big is going to happen. My instincts have been on recently. Like yesterday at the Spaghetti Factory, the waiter suggested I sit down before he served our table (a couple of us had made a quick restroom stop), but I said, "No, you serve first and we'll sit down after." And a minute after saying that while still standing at a safe distance away, I watched his entire tray go tumbling all over the seats spraying the rest of our party. After they cleaned up, we safely sat down.

So, perhaps my definition of "big" is that a waiter is not going to spill his tray on me, or maybe an earthquake, or something positive like a big acceptance, or maybe it's ... I don't know, but I'm feeling something is up in the world, or the country, or the neighborhood and I can't put my finger on it, but when I do. I'll be hoping it's something wonderful--an abundance of love, peace, happiness, poems. I'll be hoping for something good.

Slowly returning to life...

I've been a bit under the weather this week and I realize how much I can't stand being sick. First, it feels like everything is contaminated. I will only wear something once when I'm sick then I feel it needs a long soaking in hot water with lots and lots of bubbles. Also, I feel as if being sick wastes days. I look at this week and how I'm behind in everything I've wanted to do and feel I've lost time. Though I did watch Annie Hall, a movie I've always been *meaning* to watch, other than that, I slept, I watched daytime TV (which is terrible) and I wandered around in a haze.

Still, while I was sick I did manage to do some needed reading for school. The book How to Write Funny, which has a number of essays by writers and poets including Denise Duhamel, Sherman Alexie, Dave Barry, Robin Hemley, Melissa Banks, and others.

One of the main ways writers thought they create humor in their work is through exaggeration.
Or at least, this is what they think, but what I saw was the funniest writers were able to take what happened in their daily lives and tweak it either to give it an absurdity, or a "can you believe we do this?" feeling. It's sort of the Jerry Seinfeld way of noticing the strangeness in our lives that we overlook ( I always go in the airplane's bathroom, even if I don't have to go. It's nice. It's like your own little apartment on the plane, isn't it? You go in there, lock the door, the light comes on after second. It's like a little surprise party--or know I will never be able to understand how a woman can take boiling hot wax pour it on her upper thigh and rip the hair out by the root and still be afraid of a spider. I'm not spending anymore time working on that. )

I've got a pretty dry sense of humor and find that I appreciate wit and intellect, more than exaggeration and slapstick. I've seen a few male poets think they can make people laugh by the perfectly placed fart joke. There is an eight-year-old boy mentality, which many must keep otherwise there would be a whole series of movies that wouldn't be produced and South Park wouldn't be kept on the air--there is a talking turd in that show, to someone, that is golden comedy.

So, I guess these are some of the things I'm beginning to explore in my paper. First, what makes something funny? Second: What does a poet risk by using humor? Third: what actual techniques can be used to create humor or is humor so organic, it cannot be planned?

I also want to look at poems that are parodies of other poems. I've always been a fan of good parodies. Even Weird Al and his songs, some of his lyrics are pretty smart (recently, I just saw the video for White and Nerdy and I thought it was pretty funny). And the "My Cubicle" song, which is a parody on James Blunt "You're Beautiful."

Though back to poetry, here are two of my favorites:

We Old Dudes

We old dudes. We
White shoes. We

Golf ball. We
Eat mall. We

Soak teeth. We
Palm Beach. We

Vote Red. We
Soon Dead.


by Joan Murray
******************
and

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
by Kenneth Koch

1

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on
for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!