Stream of Consciousness

Closing In...

...on a completed manuscript! Hallelujah and praise the Lord! Later today, I expect to put the finishing touches on my poetry book manuscript, What Rivers Cannot Quench. A poetry pal is giving the final order the once-over today and, once she blesses and anoints it as acceptable, a few more copies to be be printed and then out the door to a batch of contests. I am beyond ready to have this project done. Some of the poems were written over five years ago and it take some finesse and tinkering to have those fit along with newer work. All this for what, sixty-one pages? Amazing, isn't it? I hope I don't have postpartum blues. I don't expect to what with my ever onward motto when it comes to marching forth into the a new forest of written words...

July 3rd...Summer in the City?

Sun, heat, sultry, for this part of the world. I'm back from travel to the Northeastern United States. Best part was the Jean Shin exhibit in D.C. There's no place like home, that's for sure. I did get to see the Shepherd Fairey Barack Obama HOPE poster while in our nation's capital as well, at the National Portrait Gallery. This is the first photograph I ever took with my teenager cell phone. Kind of sucks but hey, you had to be there. And I was and that was the image-making device I had.

Ruth Stone’s Poetry

At long last today, nearly eight years after purchasing it, I read Ordinary Words, a volume of poems by Ruth Stone which won the National Book Critics Circle Award when it was published in 1999. Stone is/was a professor in my graduate program at SUNY/Binghamton. I knew her from parties and conversations but never had a class with her. She was famous to us because she got a job as a tenured professor when she was already "old." We were all envious and agog at that. In June, she will be 94 years old. 

Yet again, I was underwhelmed by this book. Many of the poems seemed like rough drafts and a few were like talking, far too prosaic. And yet an award winner? More grade inflation, perhaps? I'm either too critical or too dumb about what counts as good poetry in these post-modern times.  I'll take a look at her new and selected volume before I write her off. Meanwhile, my favorites in this book were the almost-love poems. I was surprised by this. Hmm. I liked this one below best; it was not double-spaced in the original:

Schmaltz

Those rented rooms,

borrowed beds,

when I would lie down

with my length slack against yours

and feel those simple wounds

of the surfaces

with no thought of the garrote. 

And here, after all these years, 

I am still thinking 

if only one more time, 

that ordinary naked touch,

unconscious of its death.

And then, this morning, 

the shock of an old song,

after the usual trash of the news;

schmaltz, from the big-band days;

and Sinatra, of course, 

on a scratched record, 

the local radio's nostalgia.

It is brief, but for a moment

my body shakes

with the remembered tremor 

of your voice.

And then, the aftershock:

that he could bring it back—

this grief for which there is no cure. 

On Wickipedia I learn this about her, never known until now:

In 1959, after her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. (As she has pointed out, her poems are “love poems, all written to a dead man” who forced her to “reside in limbo” with her daughters.) For twenty years she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of California Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at State University of New York Binghamton. Today, Stone lives in Vermont.

Maira Kalman’s Blog

I just love these stories and drawings by Maira Kalman. They appear once a month as a New York Times blog called And the Pursuit of Happiness. I especially adore the one she did about the Inauguration—it starts with the word Hallelujah and gets into some pretty wild ladies' hats. She often focuses on fashion and color but also gets philosophy and deeper thinking into her tales, too. She is the fun illustrator of a new edition of Strunk and White's class The Elements of Style as well. I wrote a review of that for the writers dojo, Those Stylish Elements. Kalman's work has such a power to cheer me up. I am going to remember to look at it at least once a week. 

Blogging These Days...

...at www.writersdojo.org. Follow this link for Nancy Flynn's explorations of life, liberty, and the pursuit of creative writing happiness.

Obamicon...Me!

Thanks to a friend. We're all turning into Shepard Fairey's iconic image of Barack Obama, street art from last summer turned Smithsonian gallery art as of Inauguration last week. Yet another way we are all uniting, united, being the change we want to see in the world. 

Election Day, November 1884

From Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1891-92):

ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884.

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest

         scene and show,

'Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor

         your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-

         loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon's white cones—nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes—

         nor Mississippi's stream:

—This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name— the

          still small voice vibrating—America's choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the

         quadriennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous'd—sea-board and inland

         —Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia,

         California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and con-

         flict,

The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:)

         the peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the

         heart pants, life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails. 

Wishing Tree

I suppose I have to start walking with a camera. I see all kinds of arty, interesting, kooky, surprising things whenever I walk around our neighborhood. I was coming down Emerson, the dirt-road-in-the-city blocks and had just returned to asphalt. There on the corner between 29th and 30th sat a small tin bucket filled with narrow fabric straps. A painted wooden Buddha at the base of a tree on the hell strip. And a sign covered in plastic saying that this is, indeed, a wishing tree. And to take one of the pieces of fabric or bring your own, make a wish, and tie it to the tree. When the wind blows and the rains fall, the sign continues, your wish will sail off into the world to where it needs to be. I picked a shiny red strip and tied my wish to a fairly low branch. Then, on my way back from the grocery, I see a couple in front of me stop, read the sign, pick up a fabric strip, and tie a wish to the branch, too. 

Two Days from Summer...Spring!

It's finally warm enough today to have the front door and windows open, the fresh air rushing blissfully in. The cats are outside lazing in sun and stalking arrogant, taunting squirrels. 

This week, I've definitely shifted into some manner of re-grouping mode, stepping back to take a look at where I stand re: the writing, how I want to go forward and with what renewed attitude, energy, and vigor. All this because I was weary of the way I approach writing in my morning journals. After ten years—and 40 spiral notebooks—it felt time for something to change. When book #40 ended last Saturday, it was finally the right time. Rather than continue to feel like I was losing my marbles, I went back and took a long look at the pages and pages of insights I thought I'd gleaned over this time of trying to "live the writing life." Once again, I surprised myself at how far along this creative journey I've come. And how simple, really, it might be to shift things and actually feel like I enjoy, like I want to do this work again. 

It's always so interesting to see where progress has been made as well as where, over and again, I get tripped up and stall. If I ever got a tattoo, it ought to be along my arms where every day I could read statements like:

Trust the mystery. Surrender to process. Pen, breath, and listening and the truth comes forth. Give up perfection. Take the longer-than-daily view. Keep at it and all will be revealed. Pursue fewer things more deeply. Begin, complete, move on. 

Because these are the basic wisdom lessons over and over again for me and now, after ten years, I have no more excuses but to take them to heart, to act. What else? I need homework to generate work. And that's OK. I need audience and early, reliable readers and that's OK, too. And it feels good to get some occasional praise and recognition for the work, encouragement to keep going. 

From all of this, I've come up with a new writing to-do list, a place to start. Time to get cracking...

• Write my own definition of what it means to "get it right." 
• Update my poetry writing and reading aesthetic if needed. 
• Comb my writing books and come up with a list of exercises and prompts that speak to me, that I would have fun doing. 
• Mine my volumes of source material.    
• Find the incomplete, polish, and finish.  

Traveling the World with Bob Dylan, D.J. Extraordinaire

OK, Bob Dylan's XM satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, is a gift to eclectic music nuts like myself. It is next to impossible to catalogue the various places he goes in his commentary or find any logic to his musical selections on any given show. There have been themes about parties, walking, the concept of #1, time, cars, and so on. This week's theme is Part II of a musical journey around the world including stops in Italy (did you know it's the shape of a boot?), Tunisia, Mexico, the Congo, England, and Japan. Here are a few of the topics that Bob touches on, in no particular order, just like his random samplings on the show:

-- The concepts of longitude, latitude, and the prime meridian.

-- The idea of the super-continent, pangea, from the Greek, meaning earth.

-- Loch Lomond and the Loch Ness monster.

-- Explorers from Marco Polo to Vasco da Gama.

-- Dublin, Ireland, and the County Cork as the setting for the New Bedford scenes in John Huston's movie, Moby Dick.

-- The River Mersey in England.

--Arrivederci, Roma by Dean Martin.

-- Making copies of your passport and other important papers.

-- Capistrano, an island off the coast of Albania.

-- Tom Waits reading a letter he sent Bob about all the inbreeding in Cleopatra's family.

-- Yoko Ono and her avant-garde music and art. (Don't ask.)

This show is worth the monthly cost of satellite radio, believe you me as they say back in northeastern PA.