Milosz, carried by the waters of the river

Today is his birthday. I celebrate with a pleasing poem, pleasing, a pleaser, and true, true like colors, true like vision.

FAITH

Faith is in you whenever you look
At a dewdrop or a floating leaf
And know that they are because they have to be.
Even if you close your eyes and dream up things
The world will remain as it has always been
And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river.

You have faith also when you hurt your foot
Against a sharp rock and you know
That rocks are here to hurt our feet.
See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?
We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live.

Czeslaw Milosz, 1911–2004 (b. Poland; d. U.S.)

Subversion and Sidestepping: The e-chapbook's value (in this case, Paul Sohar's)

Here's a nifty e-chapbook. Most e-chapbooks, or at least those I've seen, are PDFs. They unfold on the screen, or so it seems, as a sort of magic simulacrum of print. Click here or there and pages are lifted and opened. It's a wonderful update of print, not necessarily (or by any means) superior, but it works.

The Wayward Orchard by Hungarian-born Paul Sohar is, as published by Wordrunner Electronic Chapbooks, more of a dedicated literary journal than a chapbook, a one-person show (worth viewing). Below the artwork of the cover lies the table of contents, which is clickable. Once a poem's read its sisters on left-side navigable. A PDF can also be downloaded.

Sohar is a poet worth reading, know that, although in this posting I'm more commenting on form than content. Please don't think faint praise. Please think, I want to check that out! And delight in the cyber possibility of subversion by not relying on traditional publishing, and the sidestep of clearcuts, by not relying on trees.

Proust on Skates (not roller)

(That's a Mendini Proust chair. Link below.)

I grabbed Anthony Hecht's Flight Among the Tombs from off library shelves a few weeks ago, thumbed through and landed on "Proust on Skates." I liked the poem for its biographical fiction, its lovely rendering of the most horizontal or writers momentarily vertical. Its formal control, something I don't aim for in my poetry but admire.


Oddly simultaneous with my reading of Hecht, I saw this comment from poet and critic Dan Chiasson, who writes, "Anthony Hecht, to me the most wearisome of plausible poets."

On the one hand, I admit that as I read other poems in the collection I wasn't impressed or drawn in, although to see my thoughts voiced so vigorously gives me pause. Anyway, here's the poem I did admire.

Proust on Skates

He stayed in bed, and at the beginning of October still wasn’t getting up till two in the afternoon. But he made a seventy-mile journey to Chamonix to join Albu [Louis Albufera] and Louisa [de Mornand, Albufera's beautiful mistress] on a mule-back excursion to Montanvert, where they went skating.    Ronald Hayman, Proust: A Biography

The alpine forest, like huddled throngs of mourners,
Black, hooded, silent, resign themselves to wait
As long as may be required;
A low pneumonia mist covers the glaciers,
Spruces are bathed in a cold sweat, the lat
Sun has long since expired.

Though barely risen, and the gray cast of the day
Is stark, unsentimental, and metallic.
Earth-stained and chimney-soiled
Snow upon path and post is here to stay,
Foundered in endless twilight, a poor relic
Of a once gladder world.

Spare café patrons can observe a few
Skaters skimming the polished soapstone lake,
A platform for their skill
At crosscut, grapevine, loops and curlicue,
Engelmann’s Star, embroideries that partake
Of talent, coaching, drill,

While a few tandem lovers, hand in hand,
Perform their pas de deux along the edges,
Oblivious, unconcerned.
This is a stony, vapor-haunted land
Of granite dusk, of wind sieved by the hedges,
Their brances braced and thorned.

Escaped from the city’s politics and fribble,
Hither has come an odd party of three,
Braided by silken ties:
With holiday abandon, the young couple
Have retreated into the deep privacy
Of one another’s eyes,

While the third, who in different ways yet loves them both,
Finds himself now, as usual, all alone,
And lacing on his skates,
Steadies himself, cautiously issues forth
Into the midst of strangers and his own
Interior debates.

Sweatered and mufflered to protect the weak
And lacey branches of his bronchial tree
From the fine-particled threat
Of the moist air, he curves in an oblique
And gentle gradient, floating swift and free –
No danseur noble, and yet

He glides with a gaining confidence, inscribes
Tentative passages, thinks again, backtracks,
Comes to the minute point,
Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes,
Larger Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs,
Preoccupied, intent

On a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant script
Incised with twin steel blades and qualified
Perfectly to express,
With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly gripped
Behind his back, attentively, clear-eyed,
A glancing happiness.

It will not last, that happiness; nothing lasts;
But will reduce in time to the clear brew
Of simmering memory
Nourished by shadowy gardens, music, guests,
Childhood affections, and, of Delft, a view
Steeped in a sip of tea.


Anthony Hecht, from Flight Among the Tombs (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
http://www.greatinteriordesign.com/tag/usd/

N.Y.C. + L.A. I am a New Yorkaleno.

I'm like one of those funny male caricatures who claim to love all women. Like Christopher Walken's The Continental.

Hear me: Skinny, fat, Page Six-reader, Anatomy of Melancholy-memorizer, I love them all. Whether they smell like dead rat topped by spoiled gefilte fish and Limburger cheese or Chanel 19 from a Rodeo Drive atomizer, Thank You to Both.

It may entail a twenty minute walk to find a cup of coffee and wi fi. The coffee, the wifi, a grocery, a health food store, post office and five thrift shops may be in a three-block radius. Mmmmmwah youse.

The time-consuming stretch may be gorgeous. The 3-blocks stinky and without enough sunlight. You're my honeys, both of ya.

Intellect everywhere. Great art everywhere. Rapid transit everywhere. What to do.

I'm a New Yorkaleno. A poet who loves New York AND Los Angeles, a New Yorker and an Angeleno. It's a cruel fate for the underly employed, the dirty lucre-challenged but there you have. I should open a New Yorkaleno Cafe. Everyone would have to wear breezey shirts, have beautiful welcoming smiles (L.A.) and be agressive and team-spirited (N.Y.).

Well, that's that.  Name it, claim it.

Acceptance. A Writer's Life

I gave a sort of impromptu talk today on art as career. How I ended up talking to that particular group of people is another story.

What interests me greatly in this story came when my mostly new friends were giving feedback. A few used the word humble. They didn't mean to say I was being humble about my achievements. I wasn't. My achievements are mere within the world of poets and that's that.

No. "Humble" was not, in fact, the correct word. What was meant and admired in me was my acceptance. "Acceptance." I don't need to be Wm. Butler Yeats or Elizabeth Bishop. I would love to be Rita Dove because that woman can tango, but I don't need to be her, either.

I want to publish my novel. I don't need it to be the great American. It's not. It's entertaining. That's enough. I will continue to publish poems and stories.

A few days ago a woman friended me on Facebook and commented she really liked my poem, "This Flesh Divine," published in Numinous in 2008. Yowza. That was three years ago. How wonderful. How satisfying. My writing hits a few in the right place and for that I am immensely grateful.

The Online-ification of Tender Beauty (Boston Review)

As an addendum to my previous posting about Boston Review (which published "From Love, Imagination" and "So Tender Beauty" in the July/August 2011 issue), both poems are online.

At least today. I'm cautious. This could be a *Poetry Wednesday* thing and the poems could disappear from the website until there's another Poetry Wednesday or until some other primitive urge strikes the diabolical editors of Boston Review. I don't know the decision-making process and haven't seen smoke rise from the chimney of their stoned quarters up there in ye-olde land (Boston).

I am in fact in love with each and every Boston Review editor but how sappy is that. 

TO READ MY POEMS, AT LEAST TODAY, JULY 13, 2011, GO H E R E FOR "So Tender Beauty" and h e r e for "From Love, Imagination."

Thank you.

My poems "From Love, Imagination" & "So Tender Beauty" are in Boston Review

"As many bridges as I can walk / I have . . ." My poem "From Love, Imagination" opens with a narrator announcing affection for suspension of a sort. Maybe, like me, she's had friends stop the car so she could climb out and walk the bridge.

Poems expand the reality of their poets.

"A sign of your times, a rose-happy glow / enameled on dawn’s fingertips" has rosy-fingered dawn fresh from the manicurist. Or something. That's from "So Tender Beauty" which seems like a dream and ends in "spray of silvered light" and more.

Both are in the July/August issue of Boston Review, a journal with spine and pages.

Many thanks to Timothy Donnelley for selecting the poems. There was a span between submission and acceptance, acceptance and publication.  All worth the wait. I don't know that patience is a virtue, but it is slow joy, anticipation an agony equal to pleasure.

To subscribe to Boston Review, "a magazine of ideas" where ideas of the idiots in charge are challenged, go here: https://www.ezsubscription.com/brv/subscribe.asp.  Poetry, fiction, essays, politics, art.

The Hammer [museum]. Startling. L.A. as found art. Fresh inventive Thek. And some ho hum Ruscha. Women needed.

Yesterday I went to the Hammer. [On the corner of Wilshire and Westwood in L.A.]

The first thing I do is sidle into a dark room to watch a Paul McCarthy video, grotesque puppets, a fabulous mockery of Disney, grunting. A human puppet simulation asks a puppet puppet insinuating questions and of course the puppet puppet just sits there. Things turn crappy, literally. I move on. The point being, I've been in a dark room, take the elevator up, and walk into the main floor which startles me.

The Hammer is a treehouse of a museum. Stepped out of the elevator, left the stairwell, and I am looking north and west to the hills and sun from a massive wraparound terrace.  Slim trees reach into the space. Sun, at least yesterday, pervades. Like the Getty, the Hammer uses Los Angeles' beauty in its readymade glory.

Exhibits?  Paul Thek, for one.  An artist who matches the space--joyous, sweet, mournful, detailed, dying like dry leaves on the terrace. Sontag dedicated Against Interpretation to Thek.

The museum's standing collection is small but every painting is extraordinary. They just are. Maybe, because I've only seen a few previously in traveling exhibits, their newness to me helps but I spend enough time staring at art to be, not inured but able to expect a level of special. These exceed mere special. Someone has an astounding eye.

The bad news is the Ruscha. Ed R. illustrating or accompanying Kerouac text. It's been done and done better. At that point there is no excuse not to include an exhibit by a woman.  This all male, male on male thing is tiresome.

The poster for the Thek is misleading. A male figure diving into a pool. A set up for Hockeny-esque work which isn't what Thek painted. Cheap tricks are cheap tricks. The Hammer is a great museum in its airy way and should be above such.

Wherein the author thinks she is witnessing the End of Days but discovers it's just the end of the day

The weirdest thing happened last week. I was leaving work at 5:30, heading uptown but still in Tribeca, when teams, bevies, squads of white men in dark slacks and white shirts open at the collar (it was a hot day) streamed up a side street, moving en masse toward me. 

They looked similar to southern Baptist preachers (via movies) and I wondered if they were running from end-times, which, apparently, had started on Greenwich and threatened Hudson Ave.  Tribeca does not have imposing skyscrapers so I didn't know what office they could possibly be coming from.  (Hey. I knew they weren't missionaries; they had the blessed corruption of the less-than-sacred in them.)

If I'd been Midtown or Downtown or some other neighborhood where Fortune 500 companies had headquarters or corporate settlements, as it were, I wouldn't have been surprised, though even standing outside, say, the old Lehman Brothers (R.I.P.) wasn't the same experience as this. Every other office I'd worked in had lower and higher level workers in the mix, the mail team, the proofreaders, the cafeteria crew, the assistant; non-whites and women.

The next day at lunch I kept an eye out, and the day after I found myself surrounded by some of their homogeneous midst when I got take-out on Beach St. I still had no clue and was reluctant to inquire after their origin. The day after, I happened to amble down to Greenwich at lunch and observed their like yet again, looked over to see an odd building hidden between apartment structures. It was a corporate Citibank outpost.

Mystery over, they were bankers and traders, maybe in a trainee incarnation. No mystery, but still the odd image of clones or pod people, evolving.  Night of the dead living. Each person is an individual but group the persons together and isolate the group, make it all of one type, and it gets weird.  My father had his weirdness, but not that weirdness, hallelujah.

Happy Fathers' Day.

Stephen Page hears, samples, and reviews The Future Is Happy.

Stephen Page has written a delightful insightful sampling review, a list review. Here's an excerpt.

A saxophone in Count Basie’s band. An Ode by Keats. George Harrison’s guitar. Cain. St. Sarai carrying infant Jesus. A Jewish Emily Dickinson hiding in an attic. Moses breaking tablets. Baden-Baden, Germany. Miss Piggy. Tijuana. Jodie Foster. Billy Bob Thornton. Denzel Washington. Ingmar Bergman. Laurence Fishburne. The Rosetta Stone. Superman’s mother. Clark Kent. Orpheus. The Oregon Highway. An angel. The goddess Venus. Jim Thorpe. New York. Rilke. Skin cancer. The Married with Children television series. Jack Kerouac. My Favorite Martian. A Woolworth’s store. James Joyce. Ulysses. Ithaca. Penelope. Helios. Socrates. Kilimanjaro. Jason of the Argonauts. California. Conan Doyle. Jenifer Lopez. The Ritz-Carlton. Strawberries. Woody Allen. A labyrinth. Walt Whitman. Sméagol with his ring in his pocket. Holden Caulfield. Humbert Humbert. Jane Eyre. Mecca. The Zig Zag Man. Such are the many allusions, images, and sounds used in Sarah Sarai’s eclectic collection of poetry, The Future is Happy.

Special thanks to Page for hearing the rhythm in my work. He's right, I'm not a formalist but I hear.

The full review is posted at Stephen Page's blog.  Originally published at "Group Pen B.A. Book Reviews" -- a site no longer live.

How dare you, V.S. Naipaul. + I like to think of myself as a stately pleasure dome.

**

Dear V.S. Naipaul,


Gosh darn. Thanks for your trash talk on culture. I can't wait to see you and Philip Roth go all girlfight over who has the worst time reckoning himself to his anatomy.

You told a journalist that all fiction by women was sentimental, narrow and inferior, and thus, you sly cat, you got me, a woman, thinking. Think about that! Oddly, though I read several of your books when I was in my twenties, I can't remember titles, plots, if I liked them or didn't. Just sayin'. In terms of sentimentality, however, I wonder about the following books which I can remember reading when I was in my twenties.

Madame Bovary. The women kills herself. Loves goes wrong, society is a hard place for a woman, and so she paints her lips a tasteful blue and falls into the big sleep. Sentimental? If she had become a whore on the streets of Paris it would be less sentimental.

Anna Karenina. The woman kills herself. Karenina is a more engrossing book than Bovary but not quite as finely stitched--Flaubert is a real real careful writer, even I could tell that and I have a vagina and breasts. Russian society is a worse place to live in than Bovary's society and Anna chooses death by the D Train. Sentimental?

D.H. Lawrence, works thereof. Granted that for those of us of a certain age it is hard to disengage from images of Alan Bates and Oliver Reed man-wrestling on fur, when we think of Lawrence. Still Lawrence writes of Big Love and not Salt Lake City style. Sentimental, Sir. Lawrence is sentimental.

Karl Marx was so fully human in his love of each person's capacity for fulfillment and so fully committed to creating a world where that is possible, that well, he must be sentimental. Cause that ain't happening anytime soon. Certainly not equality for men and women, not as long as your types smirk and strut.

Proust. Well, no one would accuse a man who creates seven volumes of written memorabilia in search of lost times sentimental. Would they? A thousand-page docket of hard thinking? Nu-uh.

The Lake Poets? Nuttin' sentimental in a field of daffodils or a stately pleasure dome. I like to think of myself as a stately pleasure dome, but that's something altogether different.

Bold Lord Byron on whose verse butter melts? He's a wonderful poet but in disfavor, in some circles, for that boldness which is sentimental in its own way.

What about some of the great saints? Theresa, John of the Cross, Francis? Isn't it implicit in such kick-butt faith a level of sentimentality which allows us to believe the unseen.

Though I've read him, I'm going to take a pass on Rabelais here but I cannot ignore the sweeping gestures of Cervantes and his windmill-dualist as sentimental.

Clear-headed and divine though he was, Spinoza expressed some sentimentality in his notion of us ending up on a far star. And please, there nothing as sentimental as one of Leibniz’s monads. Those guys and gals are all about pulling out their handkerchiefs and showing us they cannot go in or out because they are monads, boo hoo. I'm tired of it!

Blake? Thomas Hardy?

I loved reading every book and author mentioned above. Except you who I neither like nor dislike as I cannot remember one thing about your novels.

Yours until the end of this posting,
Sarah "Sentimental Me" Sarai

p.s. Have you read Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead?  I doubt it.
From some of my sisters. . .
From One Writer To Another: Shut Up, V.S. Naipaul by Diana Abu Jabar

In a Sentimental Mood by Danielle Pafunda

Sentimental, Narrow, Women’s Writing. Alas, Alack, Anon! by Roxane Gay

**The gorgeous monads available here. (If you don't know Leibnitz look elsewhere for what a real monad is. This monad is a computer thing but lovely.)

Review: G.E. Schwartz, LVNGinTONGUES, poems in a different margin

 Lokesh Khodke*

G.E. Schwartz writes with one eye on "our dust" and the other (our third?) on us--us--here. I just read his chapbook LVNGinTONGUES (Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press) and now want you to read it.

It's a flow of poem, LVNGinTONGUES, an aggregate of short poems unfettered by titles, which makes me wonder if titles aren't a needless colonizing marker:  Hey, folks, let me tell you what this here poem is about!  (I use them but that's no excuse.)  Instead of being drawn to a title as we expect, in Schwartz' chapbook we are thrown to an unfamiliar place, a different margin, a place slightly disquieting, riveting and dislocating, over there, on the other side.

And thus (and through poetic alchemy) prepared for death in all its daily guises and for a greater death. We are reminded of our fragility and of that which is awe-inducing.

WHITES or blacks, linen

or porphyry,

one in the same to the

same of us --

but out where dust

is blown -- there's a tomb

built of clay and bronzed

that should make us

waver

These poems are written as quiet revelations of the dark hope that we are even capable of wavering.  That if we can't transcend, we can know our lack, our inability.  Better to realize that, say, I can't become Gerard Manley Hopkins, than to be so dulled I toss the book aside and return to t.v. and Ruffles. (That's me speaking, though I know Schwartz a bit and thus know he likes Hopkins. I saw Schwartz read down here--he lives upstate New York--and know he appreciates the gifts (jazz, friendships).

THROAT-HAWK nightscreaming

stand     up leave the rest

of us on the table

when life is with you

are struck across time

bark at strangers

feed the incorrigible

appetite of edifices

shadow dust, hate the light

. . . the incorrigible appetite of edifices . . .   Yeah. I say yeah however I read the word edifices--our culture, our corporations, the body as structure . . .   (And oh, I suppose the capitalizing of the first words of each poem serves as an ex officio title.  Maybe the eye needs something. Anyway it's a nice touch.)

The ultimate disclaimer is that Schwartz reviewed my book, here. And so with that frisson of joy that someone who has insight into my writing is so intelligent and gifted himself I recommend these poems. oH, i assuME the title IS A NOd to lanGUAge poetrY.

Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press. PO Box 453, Arroyo Grande, CA 93421. $7.

*Beautiful painting, Edifices, by Lokesh Khodke. Found here.

Religion Switching . . .a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. . .

***

Maybe I've said this before, but when I was in my early twenties, I decided I needed limits.

I was at the Bodhi Tree, a bookstore of mysticism, religion and of course a little tripe east, west and in the middle.  The sun was setting, maybe I was looking out a window or onto a courtyard, hard to be specific some thirty years later but there was sun and however many miles I stood from its thousand hot tongues I was close enough to its Pacific reflections to feel the distant yet present love of the universe.

Classically inclined, I'd been working my way through writings of the saints west and east. Dope-smoking and contemporary I read Be Here Now (Baba Ram Das) and other books which were great reads at the time and maybe still are.  I was always reading.

But at that moment, that point in flowing time which has no one point in point-of-fact and perhaps no point other than its own silky flow, I knew I needed restraining. I could go anywhere and did, mentally and spiritually and psychically.

You will stay in the west, I said. (I was you.)  That means Christianity, Judaism, Islam.

Note that I was not limiting my reading. Reading cannot be limited. I was limiting my joining. I can't quite say if this transpired before or after my two-year once-a-week training at the Healing Light Center (Rosalyn Bruyere is a real deal aura reader, per the UCLA Dept. of Kinesiology and she just is) or other interests and ventures. It was definitely years before I taught at a Catholic high school.

I'd been trucked over to the Annie Besant Center in high school by my Christian Science mom, though I can't say why, exactly. It might have had something to do with guitar lessons. My Jewish father believed, to his credit, but didn't quite have the gene for spirituality qua place-in-the-heart to hobby I did, my mom did, two of my three sisters did.  (The third sister would not allow so much as a Thanks, You! before a big meal, which reveals a ungene to be respected.)

Hopefully some reader or other is tracking this posting because I cannot figure out where I am right now (in the writing, not my body).  But lifetime-wise, I did stay within Sarah-proscribed guidelines, which were, I admit, partly a matter of style--I dreaded seeing those super serious westerners being so obviously devotee-like when it came to all things Buddhist. That sort of public demonstration of faith has been discredited by luminaries such as Hafiz, Rumi, Jesus, and every single religious person of serious intent. And my intent is serious. God help me.

But also I believed it to be a good idea and though I've had regrets, as a married person regrets her or his beautiful choice when there are so many gorgeous choices, I stayed on track.

Thus here I am, writing this because someone urged a short-lived discussion on a poetry listserv about Buddhist poetry, one of my madeleines (I buy them by them by the dozens) and it got my mind a'wandering. See the problem?

What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. (James 4: 14; not sure which tr.)

***painting by Richard Bizley

W. G. Sebald and the crummy gift of history

A seacow. Stellar saw and described them
for the non-indigenous.

I had some challenges getting into After Nature, W. G. Sebald's first and final work (first book written but last published), which is historical, biographical and autobiographical. No daffodil fields in After Nature, even if Sebald did move to England from Germany in his twenties and stay put until his accidental death some thirty years later.

I set the book aside as a full-on read and dipped into portions randomly, and a few weeks later started at the end with the final of three sections, the autobiographical poem. His parents being adults during WW II, Sebald had the crummy gift of history going for him.

Then I returned to the second section, about Georg Wilhem Steller, a botanist who accompanied the brooding explorer Bering into the Arctic. Here are melancholy, troubled Herr Bering, Europe's savaging of indigenous peoples, and Stellar's gloomy death, and poetic ambiguity. Nature has her way. Oh? with a godless ??? Lutheran (of course) from Germany.

At Tyumen they carry him out of the sledge,
drag his half-petrified body
out of the ice into the fire,
into a furnace house.
Now begins alchimia,
Steller recognises the mortem improvisam,
the stroke and all its appendage,
sees his death, how it is mirrored
in the field-surgeon's monocle.
Such are you, doctores,
split lamps,
thus nature has her way
with a godless
Lutheran from Germany.

Back to section one which had at first won my heart, being poetry and art history all-in-one. It's about Matthias Grunewald, a late-medieval painter of, needless-to-say, sorrow, the man of sorrows, His holy mother, angels. Like Stellar, Grunewald saw European barbarity: pogroms and quashed peasant rebellion.* The lines feel telegraphed, a not uncommon sensation for a reader of poetry, but this reader didn't think they had been telegraphed on the same day.

But the bodies of peasants piled up
into a hetacomb, because. As though they were mad,
they neither put up any resistance
Nor took to their heels.
When Grunewald got news of this
On the 18th of May
He ceased to leave his house. Yet he could hear the gouging out
Of eyes that long continued
Between Lake Constance and
The Thuringian Forest. For weeks at that time he wore
A dark bandage over his face.

What made the reading difficult is the almost arbitrary nature of line breaks and stanzas in the first section. I thought it was me, fresh off of three some months of researching streams of information for a client. I thought I could not bear one more fact. But on looking at it again and on noodling around the Internet to read other impressions of the book I feel safe in agreeing with myself about the first section. (Michael Hamburger's translation is not the issue.)

On the first of October the moon's shadow
slid over Eastern Europe from Mecklenburg
over Bohemia and the Lausitz to southern Poland,
and Grünewald, who repeatedly was in touch
with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,
will have travelled to see this event of the century,
awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,
so will have become a witness to
the secret sickening away of the world,
in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk
in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit
poured through the vault of the sky,
while over the banks of mist and the cold
heavy blues of the clouds
a fiery red arose, and colours
such as his eyes had not known
radiantly wandered about, never again to be
driven out of the painter's memory.
These colours unfold as the reverse of
the spectrum in a different consistency
of the air, whose deoxygenated void
in the gasping breath of the figures
on the central Isenheim panel is enough
to portend our death by asphyxiation; after which
comes the mountain landscape of weeping
in which Grünewald with a pathetic gaze
into the future has prefigured
a planet utterly strange, chalk-coloured
behind the blackish-blue river.

I also feel confident in recommending After Nature. A little struggle and disappointment in a beautiful read is good for a poet.

*[An exceptional exploration of the Grunewald section by Dorothea von Mücke is available here.]

Sisters, Memorial Day

This is a weird way to memorialize Memorial Day. But honest, if that counts. I woke up thinking about my sister, Judy. 

Who died in the past ten years.  Of cancer. She'd braved chemo for four years.  Of the four girls--me and my three sisters--she was the only one who had kids, a comment on my family of course.  There's a whole lot I'm not going to say here.

We didn't have a great relationship and I knew I'd need help mourning her when she passed so I tried Gilda's Place, you know, Gilda Radner.  It's a great gift for grieving relatives but for me, flawed.  Gene Wilder unabashedly loved his wife.  Him, I believe. I needed another way to talk about my sister and ended up elsewhere (no specifics, sorry). 

What I have never chipped away at in trying to grieve or mourn her is what could have been.  What was--was my niece and nephew, two amazing, intelligent, joyous, complicated (but not too complicated), beautiful kids who are now beautiful adults.  Other than them and the fact of family (a big fact, granted) we, Judy and I, wouldn't have been friends (unless, in the big hypothetical, my not being family would made me more worthy in her eyes). Probably because our interests were so different but more because her response to mine was too often disinterest and contempt I had to hide so much of who I was around her. She made fun of my friends.

Who she met, granted, only because I lived in her house for two years in the early seventies.  It was my only fallback, my mother having moved on divorce before my first year in college was over. There was no other family. So when I was in my early twenties Judy left me there with her husband while she went on long business trips. No, it wasn't worse case scenario, but it was funky.

I can't even begin to explain how race figures into this. Mainly as a gift. Really and truly. But I was a chubby white hippie-influenced intellectual with a black inlaws, living in the Crenshaw District.  And my white sister was anti-intellectual and anti-art--or any art I liked.

She talked to me long and hard about her life.  I could never say much about mine.  Not to her. I don't think she wanted to know me, but I think she liked me. A lot of people liked me for a lot of years, but they didn't want to know me.  These days I want to know me and honestly care about only a few people.  My triple-Aquarianness accounts for my great caring for anyone used by others, the wretched on our earth, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon.  Otherwise, today at l east, I'm just trying to figure out how to connect better with the few.

Cool website: Writers and Kitties. {I kinda sorta lied. No W.G. Sebald today.}

"George Bernard Shaw being Irish with his kitty."

Time is a wild stallion and I'm no horse whisperer. I couldn't tame a lunch hour, let alone twenty-four hours of potential lunch hours, i.e., a day.

Which is to say that contrary to yesterday's promise of a bit about W.G. Sebald in My 3,000 Loving Arms on Tuesday, today (Tuesday) there is nothing here about W.G. Sebald (unless we count my writing that there is nothing here about W.G. Sebald as being about W.G. Sebald). (Not likely.)

Instead and with much delight I am offering you a neato website I chanced on, Writers and Kitties. See lumniaries of the written word along with their familiars, Pyewackets, meow mixers.

Truman Capote, Camus, Bishop, Twain, Burroughs, Smith, HIGHsmith. (Smith is Patti, Highsmith is Patricia. Okay?) And more.

The captions are not pushy or cute (thank God), but some are funny.  "Jim Thompson and his kitty star in another police pulp fiction."  "V.S. Naipaul and his postcolonial kitty." "Mark Twain shooting pool with his kitty. They get their hair done in the same place."

Someday, when I run dry of ways to avoid writing, I will go to this site and read the hundreds of comments viewers have posted on each photo. 

My Mind is not a Database

Over the past three months I have researched and entered well over 100,000 facts, pieces of information, data related to medical advertising, medical editing, scientific research and good restaurants for take-out, into my brain.

When, two Saturdays ago, I attended a lecture on one school of Sufi thinking, I luxuriated in the possibility of overriding some of the nesting and organized details of Pub Med (see previous posting) and academic honors with more beautiful facts. Having been shown gorgeous slides of Sufi shrines and tombs to Sufi teachers I felt a possibility of peace and a cleaner, less encumbered mind.

One teaching numbed me in an exciting way. A sage had urged Muslims should pray for all Muslims. I hear parallel versions of that in churches--praying for all Christians--but I never gave it much thought before.  (And parallel, also, in synagogue, to include the third of my personal triad.) Seemed like a standard issue preaching from the pulpit. At the time I thought that if I generalize Islam, reduce it to its most mystical branch, praying for all Muslims is a joy.  However:

If I reduce Christianity, reduce it to its mystics and decent faithful believers who really try to do good, help the poor, and get enough inspiration to keep going, blanket prayers are also easy. But my mind instantly went to Christians I dislike: the hateful rightwingers; "pro-lifers" who kill in the name of pro-life; the well-fed aristocracy of clerics all religions have now and in history which commit abuses including sexual abuse and, by refusing to allow use of condoms, are responsible for millions and millions of deaths by AIDS, well, then my praying is challenged.

You won't believe it, but I thought I was leading up to writing about poet W.G. Sebald's After Nature, which was my subway book last week.  It's part of my database mind reaction. I'll tell you about that tomorrow.  For today, I hope (and pray) for everyone's highest angels to elevate us all. It's the best I can do; may it be doable for our higher angels.

This is not a leak. This is public info about FDA approval of a perinatal drug.

from the movie Babies

This is not a leak.  This is public information, posted at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21471853. First a bit of background on Pub Med, then the nonleak itself (about a drug the FDA approved).

Pub Med is the online, open-access archive of all articles published in medical journals. While the full article may not be available for free online, the abstract is (not all articles in the New York Times or many literary journals are for free, either). The full article is in the specific journal, and all relevant information needed to hunt that down is in the link. For your edification the number at the end of the link is specific.

Every article published in medical journals is assigned a number and can be researched by inputting the number, in this case 21471853, into Pub Med. I do a bit of related research (is how I know this).

Now for "Unjustified Increase in Cost of Care Resulting From U.S. Food and Drug Administration Approval of Makena (17α-Hydroxyprogesterone Caproate)."

Six physician/researchers from, variously the Albert Einstein Medical Center; the Yale University School of Medicine; the Washington University School of Medicine; the University of North Carolina School of Medicine; Massachusetts General Hospital; and the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston co-wrote the article.

The plot is simple and time-tested. A drug company (Big Pharm twirling its shellacked mustachio) and the FDA (a few select officials made all the happier) got together.

I am in no position to say if there was malfeasance or simple neglect. Also I am taking the researchers' words to be true--something I can't verify. That said, I have never seen an article like this.

The drug is Makena. It is manufactured by KV Pharm. Its use run $30,000 per pregnancy (for preterm deliveries; those costs are prohibitive to many. BUT there are alternatives to its use. Good, scientific, medically sound low-cost 9or far lower cost) medicines for preterm deliveries / perinatal care.

Makena's approval ENDANGERS lives. "This increased health care cost is not justified at this time."

And further, the team maintains:

The price barrier to access imposed by KV Pharmaceutical actually could result in an increase in preterm deliveries over current rates. Actions are needed by the FDA, national societies, and the manufacturer to ensure that all high-risk patients continue to get the needed therapy to reduce the number of preterm births.

So I am doing my little bit to get the information out there, to you and whoever you pass it onto. Pro-lifers, by which I mean vigilant anti-abortion groups, should take up the cause. Right?

Some Ways I Kept My Foot in the Waters Today

Still unable to carve out serious writing time, so for now I'm just happy I do anything. Today? On the way to work I read a few poems from W. G. Sebald's first collection, After Nature which I picked up at a used books store last night.  Involving poems and great interweaving of stories and history.

Tonight I went to KBG Bar and heard Deborah Landau read from her new collection. Her sensibility is sweetly raw, gently painful, fluid, female. I bought The Last Usable Hour (Copper Canyon Press). More later.

Well, that's it.  What did you do today to please The Blessed Mother Art?  If nothing, there's still time.

Illustration: http://linda-severn.blogspot.com/2009/11/lady-philosophy.html

Consumer Complaint: Best Buy's Lies

A few months ago I bought a new notebook.  I knew what I wanted, played with a few models to be sure, and efficiently and independently made my decision.

Then Best Buy's standard practice went into operation. The young man who was assigned to get my computer from storage told me he'd see if there were any left (of the notebook that had been nationally advertised). He was sure there weren't and urged me to buy a pricier model.

I asked that he check for my model. It was in.

Then he tried to sell me a Word package.  I told him a use OpenOffice--shareware.  He shook his head in warning but saw I wasn't budging and so launched into the protection plan offer.  You know how wise guys sell "insurance" to candy store owners and butcher shops. That's what it felt like. He kept insisting my computer would  not be safe unless I spent another hundred dollars on a Best Buy maintenance plan.

I've been using computers since 1985. Maybe around 1987 I had to get my harddrive checked out but other than that, nothing. I declined, but what was insulting (yes, I know I'm taking this personally) was his comment to the sales girl about me, how I was a lost cause. She ignored him.  Buying my little $300 and change Toshiba was one long lying sales pitch from Best Buy.

Now I have a new cell phone I have to return to Best Buy. The clerk lied to me. I know lied is a strong word, but I am quoting the phone carrier. We just got off the line.  I've been using this make phones and plans since the get-go.  Best Buy has stepped up its bid to fill in its financial holes by way of pressure and misrepresentation or mistakes of ignorance; I'm especially annoyed.

Big picture is I am thankful I can currently swing purchases--a new notebook a few months ago--a new phone (my old died). I'm thankful for the convenience and opportunity.  My very first cell phone about seven years ago paid for itself in less than four hours through some freelance work.

So that's that. A rant. A nonpoetic segue.  And now I see it is an opportunity for me to recalibrate my emotions so I remember what I want out of life--it's not anger. Onward and with less emotion.

And for today, I am saved-er; when one job ends another looms; writing

I'm going to start with a post script. Using a Homer Simpson illustration may just undermine any attempt at seriousness here.  Oh well.  Here goes.

There is space in my head today, the kind of space a westerner appreciates, with sweeps of sky thinning into infinite firmament, mountain ranges on the horizon, shrubs, the many passions of dirt..

One job ended. It had been a long spell of databasing and so much information my brain rearranged itself. That's okay. It's malleable, my brain is. Further arrangements can be made and the rearrangement isn't so bad.  I felt its impact a few weeks ago when I wrote a few drafts.  Not so later with a different draft but any influence on a poem is if not good, then at least worth consideration and evaluation. 

Makes me wonder, did driving myself so much for these past few months open a few new passageways, block a door or two, narrow a circuit?  Does the new wallpaper work for me or doesn't it.  Yeah, I'm being abstract but then I'm not saying so much that detail is called for.

Only four hours of work today.  A full half-day vacation--time to detox or adjust as if I just stepped off a cross-country flight and am vibrating in solidarity with the airplane. 

Something new on Monday. And creation this weekend. Energy's being lowered like stars onto a stage. Everything's a prop. Every prop serves.

For today, I am saved

After work --ten hours-- I walked straight to a park for bark leaves shadows a whole different (lower thrum) vibration like a giant freezer might have if its shiny depth held tree trunks leaves shadows. 

Breathe breathe. 

My almost escaped Soul chooses to give me another shot. She is always ready to bolt.

Hope for me, there is hope for me, She believes. My Soul She likes flesh, likes a body without which She is intelligent ether only.

Without my Soul I am unintelligent electrochemistry. Souls find new bodies. Bodies don't find new Souls. That's a mystery.

Apple, spinach, celery.  Fresh juice. Cashews.  Carob-covered raisins.  Dinner.  I tell my soul She is  happy.  She doesn't care about spinach cashews raisins. She wouldn't care if I were macrobiotic or ate beef and chocolate cake for every meal.

Would She?

Why am I writing about Soul?  Why do I always land here?  Minutes ago I said, Sarah, write something anything, for any reason, or because you're a writer.

It's done.  Thanks for your indulgence.  For today, I am saved.

The Lower Depths and The O.C.

I saw a performance of The Lower Depths last night.

In life and writing Gorki was loyal to the concept of freedom. He'd been friends with an early version of Lenin and criticized the later, repressive and vicious version.  The Lower Depths is modern to the core and chatty, packed with conversations of the eternally bamboozled (who are always with us).  His bamboozled are in a basement.  That alone put me on edge because I'm allergic to mold.It's not a bar but did remind me of the dark bar and bar stool-ees in The Iceman Cometh.

Booze, more booze, hitting wives, greed and centuries of resignation also put me on edge. The production counted among its beautiful czarist-era sluttish derelicts a dear relative of mine. And was intelligent, witty and dark.  Nothing there to displease Gorki.  The audience was especially attentive and supportive.

Oddly I was reminded of the O.C., a t.v. show that takes place in a dreamy Southern California bedroom community (in, duh, Orange County). Characters in the O.C. have dental and medical plans, great bodies, great wardrobes, great skin, great nutrition, sun, fun, school, and a little tribulation but troubles always work out.  And there's a lot of hanging out and talking about life.

And that's why it came to mind last night.  I guess.  I was laughing at myself (on the inside) when I thought that, but in a weird way that outlandish comparison with smooth, sunny Southern Cal. makes the play even more universal. People hang out. They have problems (who to take to the prom or as is the case of Gorki's characters, how to avoid  eviction in the dead of a Russian winter or stop a husband from relentless beatings of his wife or flat-out life-sucking despair).

I'm so proud my relative was riveting.  And in a classic. Acting was strong. Set was spot on.  Wardrobe close to perfect.  Gorki's depiction is a reveal on possibilities of higher natures. Of course I'm American to my positive thinking core. And still proud of my grand niece.

Poem: A Cruel Mistress Is a Cruel Mistress

The moon is in the seventh house to the left,
up from the corner, your left, not mine.
The seventh seal bounces a beach ball on her snout.
The beach balled.
Don't ask.
Your trousers got sandy.
His dancing shoes were abducted by kelp.
Kelp! Kelp! the heels called.
Her gown hemmed and hawed.
The moon is hemmed in by hope.
The seventh sandal has no soul.
Death stalks celery.
Your soul, She moons my beach ball.
The heels grieve for their leather uppers.
If I were a carpenter you'd be a county fair.
A cigar is just a cigarillo happy to see you.
The dance of the seventh veil
distracted the kelp.
The first six have no rhythm.
The heels had a new hero while the soul
slipped into Her gown.
You are part of my journey,
She whispered to the bodice.
Venus threw water on the moon.
Get a room, the sun said,
as the towel sang
it wanted to be loved by you,
by you,
and nobody else.

___________
the above written by Sarah Sarai in celebration of taking a day off to spend with beautiful nieces. o, a leisurely morning. o, coffee, o, eggs, o yes.

Notes of a Pre-pre-birther: Show me the dotted line with God's John Hancock

*

For too long this nation has been swept up like fallen Corn Flakes by a feverish broom the handle of which is gripped by "birthers."

My hunch is the broom handle is old and dried out, and the birthers in their frenzied states got splinters and by now have oozing wounds which cause them to be crazier than their God-given insanity specified.

What I am is a Pre-pre-birther. I want proof of the spark in the eye of Barack's father and the spark in the eye of Barack's mother. I want written certification that Barack Obama was once a a little bit of universal consciousness waiting his turn at this thing called "being human."  "Being human" is a duty all bits of universal consciousness must fulfill even though most understand it obliges them to 0-100  (and change) years of misunderstanding and embarrassment, of forgotten anniversaries, of the opportunity to participate in colonialism as either a colonel or colonel-ee.

Sure "being human" does come with party gifts, those being the occasional heart-stopping sunset of colors which make your eyes spin and your toes curl plus at least a few personal moments of dizzying joy and connection, and yay for all that.  But basically it must be proven, to me, that humans are human.

So until you show me the dotted line with God's John Hancock, I will continue in my delirious understanding that Barack Obama is a global hallucination.  Ditto Dolly Parton.  Ditto me.  Ditto you.

*I love Dolly Parton and will fight to the death any who make fun of her.  Ditto Barack.  Ditto me.