"I can remember being happy and wondering if that meant I wasn’t deep."

John Brantingham with Archie Goodboy

The truth is, as human beings we all suffer. But suffering is not the only wellspring of creativity. It's possible to be happy and be a writer, as John Brantingham and I discuss in the latest installment of my Books That Inspire series:

You told me that you hope your book The Green of Sunset offers people a way to focus on small, seemingly unimportant things to help them through difficult times. Can you say more about why you think poetry has the capacity to heal?

So much of what hurts people is self-inflicted. The way we see the world creates our reality. Poetry and the arts in general give us a way to understand the world. The arts are a global conversation, and much of that is a discussion that helps us through the difficult times.

When I was younger, I read novels constantly, and they helped me. One year, when I was going through religious questioning, I read nothing but Brian Moore and Graham Greene, and the two of them let me know that other people had the same kinds of questions that I had, and that they were important questions. At the very least, poetry lets us know that we’re not alone.

There are times in your life when a book, movie, or painting hits you just at the moment when you need it, and in a flash you understand, and that artistic moment stays with you and drives you. Ted Kooser does that to me a lot. Tolkien did that for me when I was a kid. I was hard of hearing and lonely then, and Tolkien gave me a world beyond myself.

And I think that most of the time, it does more than that. It gives us multiple perspectives on the world’s chaos, and I always want my poetry to be healing in some way. It needs to affirm hope and courage above all other things. Art can do that too.

My wife, who is an artist, led me there and I can see the larger conversation of the arts now. It’s beautiful if you follow the right artists. The cynicism and negativity that often drags people down is easy and childish. If people hit my poetry at the right moment, I want them to see the beautiful possibility that there is for them.



Even if you don't normally read poetry, I bet you'll like this book.



In the title poem of The Green of Sunset, you write: "I hope you realize bitterness comes only from moments that stick out in our minds like pustules on a tongue. We chew on them, given them an importance they don't have to have." Do you think being bitter is a choice? Can you say more about how this idea might be important to you?

 

There are people out there who have been through a great deal, and it’s hard to fault them for bitterness, but yes, to some degree I do [think it's a choice], at least it is for me. I wrote this book at a very difficult time in my life. We’d wanted to adopt a child and had gotten to know the mother very well, but it didn’t go the way we wanted it to go. In part it was written for me to remind me that I need to focus on what is beautiful in life.

 

I’d been drinking pretty hard, often a fifth of bourbon in an evening, and had put myself into a kind of spiral. I realized that the way out for me was through the arts and by not focusing on those things that depressed me. I started volunteering and working with other people. I started writing more and reading more. I haven’t ever been to therapy, and I won’t as long as this is working for me.

 

We didn’t need all of the big things as long as we had all of those little things. We had daily art and long walks and the joy of seeing people doing amazing things. There is so much profound joy in the world, I knew that we shouldn’t focus on those couple of moments that had been terrible.

 

The second key to this was being with someone all the time who I feel I can trust and talk to. I don’t know how far the arts would go to keeping me out of my head if I weren’t with Annie. She helps me and I help her to focus on that which is larger than we are. I don’t think people need to be with a husband or wife for this, just around other people.

 

The depressed, suicidal writer is fetishized in much of literary history. Do you think we must suffer in order to write well? How do you think such a view of the artist affects you as a writer--and your students?

It’s difficult to write about writers and poets working on craft. It’s not dramatic, and therefore, bad writing. The alternative then is to write about those things in their lives that make them interesting on a human level. It’s much easier in a class about Hemingway to talk about his suicide or his alcohol abuse. I’m saying this as someone who teaches literature, and I have found myself focusing on those things, which is a mistake that I’ve made in my teaching career.

The truth is that Hemingway did abuse alcohol and he did kill himself, but a lot of people have done that. No one would say that good bridge engineers really should drink and be depressed or they wouldn’t be in the right headspace to construct great bridges, but there aren’t many good movies about bridge engineers. If there were, it would be hard to make them because the internal life just doesn’t translate well into movies, stories, or biographies.

So, I think “fetishized” is right. It’s obsessive and irrational. Yes, a lot of writers have been suicidal because a lot people have been suicidal. The two things do not correspond. That kind of view affected me a lot. I can remember being happy and wondering if that meant I wasn’t deep. What a ridiculous thought.

I’ve had to talk to students about alcohol and drug use. I don’t think that they should stay away from alcohol necessarily, but if they think drinking and drugging is going to make them good writers they’re absolutely in for some trouble. They’re going to stop writing pretty soon.

The relationship of the arts to depression is this: the arts can heal depression to some degree for some people. Of course, I don’t mean clinical depression. However, people absolutely do not need to be depressed to create art.

 

I love the rhythm of your writing, the way it showcases how the mind wanders and connects. Because you use common vernacular, I'd call your style an accessible version of stream-of-consciousness. Have you always written this way, more or less, or has this style developed over time? What has influenced your progression as a writer? (I feel Walt Whitman in your work...do you?)

I’m someone who believes very much in form, so much so that I wrote a textbook about it, The Gift of Form. The idea behind that book was that each form gives the poet something different, and if you approach formed poetry differently than you do free verse, you will have a unique experience but still gain something from the poetry. The formal poet should stay focused on the line not thinking about the ending of poem and trusting that the form will draw out ideas rather than starting with the idea and trying to force it into the form.

Anyway, that was the idea I had with these poems. Because of the way I was feeling, scattered and unfocused and confused about what the point of my life was, I turned to prose poetry, which focuses on the poetic sentence. It can go on and on and allows a kind of outpouring of emotion.

You flatter me with Walt Whitman. Yeah, he’s a big influence. The most direct influence for this collection was Gary Young, who is my favorite prose poetry writer. I read his collections over and over while writing. Then, there are a ton of others -- Thomas Lux, Tony Barnstone, Gerry Locklin, Sharon Olds, Donna Hilbert, to name a few.

I try to have a completely different style for each collection to capture the meaning and message of the poems and my mood. I just released Dual Impressions: Poetic Conversations about Art with a friend, and I often used a sonnet form. Other times, I’d use single stressed lines to help mute the tone of the poem.

What would you tell your younger self?

I’d tell him to slow down and not work so damn much. I’d tell him to quit his job selling clothing and live without money for a while so he could focus on writing. Also, I’d tell him that all of those feelings of self-loathing are ridiculous. He’s all right.

I’d tell him to get married sooner, to find a way to do that through writing. I’d tell him to read more. I’d tell him to care for his friends more and to listen to jazz.

I’d tell him to take Annie to Europe and live there as long as he can. I’d tell him to take Annie to the mountains and live there as long as he can. I’d tell him to take that internship at that magazine that he passed up and to work at Mt. San Antonio College because he’d really love the people there.

I’d tell him to watch as many movies as he can and subscribe to museums so he can write there. Finally, I’d tell him to find a way to own as many dogs as he can. There’s no joy in this world like a dog’s joy.
 

What else would you like to add?

For the last two years, Annie and I have been volunteering at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, teaching poetry and art to people in week-long sessions. We arrange it so the students are volunteers and as long as they agree to donate at least one piece of art or poetry, the week and park entrance is free. Some weeks, we backpack. Other weeks, we stay in the front country and work. In any case, it’s an amazing adventure, and anyone reading this can join us. The connection to nature and art is unlike anything you’ve experienced, and we have scientists along to give us insight into what we’re seeing. Please contact me for more information on that, or friend me on Facebook.

John Brantingham is the author of books of several books of fiction and poetry--as well as hundreds of poems, stories and essays. He teaches at Mt. San Antonio College and lives in Seal Beach. He is currently working on a collection of flash fiction pieces with Grant Hier, meant to be the entire history of California from 10,000 BCE until now. He's also writing a poetry collection that explores the natural history of California focusing mostly on Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.Visit his website here, and friend him on Facebook here.
 

Dolphin Poem

Dolphins we swam with on the Big Island (credit)

My friend Anne Jennings Paris has been challenging some of us to write the poems that she's been assigning to her students.  Recently, she asked us to write a poem in the style of Emily Dickinson.  This poem was inspired by meditations I've been doing lately that focus on my breath.  During a meditation, I envisioned a dolphin.  I felt like she was there as a kind of spirit guide.

I Felt a Dolphin Come to Me

I felt a dolphin come to me
before I saw her there.
She clicked and cawed beneath the sea
aglide with breath to spare.

She looked me sideways in the eye
her heft a soft gray stone—
she told me I can summon her
the times I feel alone.

The cobalt depths were limitless,
the water a yielding skin.
I felt my breath reach endlessness,
my spirit spread within.

She rose through blue to blue above,
crowning sky and sea—
her perfect breath invited love
to breathe inside of me.

And I'm up!

My first Quarrel poem has been posted.

Laws of perspective

Annie has posted a new poem on her blog.

I may be biased, but I love her work.

Veeped out

Check out this blog. Is Obama a poetry lover?

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So, Creaky McCain chose Hot Mama Palin. She ain't as hot, though, as either Obama.

Besides, Gandhi as a VP couldn't get me to vote McCain.

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I'm off to Santa Cruz to take a long beach walk with my friend, Stacey. She is writing a novel for her MFA thesis, and I'm the lucky one who gets to be her advisor. Gone are the days I had to slog through MA in Education theses written in bureaucratic-ese.

The Lurie Distinguished Professor is . . .

In addition to all of these visiting writers, Sandra M. Gilbert will be on our campus the whole semester of Spring 2009 in an endowed professorship.

She's well known not only for her poetry but for her feminist scholarship, her memoir, and her teaching for years at UC Davis.

Here are two of her poems:

God, He Had a Hat!

Mrs. Rabinowitz is sitting on the beach with her little grandson, who is playing in thesand with a pail and shovel when a great tidal wave suddenly appears and sweeps him out to sea. Mrs. Rabinowitz (shaking her fist at the sky): God, bring him back! Bring that little boy right back! Another tidal wave appears and deposits the grandson on the beach, next to Mrs. Rabinowitz. Mrs. Rabinowitz (after scrutinizing the child for a minute): God, he had a hat!

It’s the fifties and we stand in the doorway kissing,
suited in the decorum of our age,
shameless in ignorance.

Our betrothal kisses are small, soft,
nervous as rabbits venturing toward the yard
where the mastiff lunges on his chain and the chain

rattles its gravity across concrete.
But my nineteen-year-old
stance is gracious and wifely,

as if bidding an office-bound spouse goodbye,
although I feel the weird prod of your hard-on
poking against gray wool.

Goodbye, goodbye, sweetheart!
Goodbye to your graduate-student face,
your face of a young cynic that blurs as I kiss it!

Goodbye to your innocent almost-pompadour
(soon to be shaved in Basic by the 4th A.D.)!
Goodbye to the startled fur of your brows!

Past midnight, we’re through kissing, my father
waits in his fat chair, his haze of smoke,
and you dissolve into the vague hall,

the leafy sidewalks, the lit-up all-night
subways whose overheated cars
rumble into the dark like stage sets.

But now your hat swims back to me,
the one you’re wearing in the snapshot
just outside the honeymoon hotel—

gray felt, prematurely middle-aged,
with a brim stiff as cardboard and a crown
that was kind and crushable and soft,

soft as a peach to the touch. . . .

*

Chocolate

In the end, in the long-term
wing of the assisted living
home, in the small white chamber

looking out on the patio's locked-in
blooms or in the big plain
"day room" with its blaring

TV and hopeful posters,
they fed my mother
ground-up piles of pallid

stuff in bowls clamped onto
a plastic tray and at first
she smiled, delicious, delicious,

as she sucked the oozing
juices, the last pap,
smiling surrounded by fellow

diners drooping and mumbling
in their places until
after a while she tightened

her lips against the food and
instead began unknotting,
unknotting the flowered

gown, unclothing her wasting
nakedness still white and smooth
and then at the very end,

when dreamy and slim
as a teen she welcomed
old friends and relatives who flickered

on the walls, the curtains
of the tiny room, nodding,
hello, sit down, to the shiny

nothing, she'd eat nothing
but chocolate, only chocolate,
so every day I brought an oblong

Lindt or Hershey
and square by square
she took in mouthfuls,

smiling and nodding, square
by square, delicious, dear,
until she finally

swallowed the whole dense bar.

Can he help us heal?

I came out as a Barack Obama convert in February, much to the dismay of some of my feminist friends who were pulling for Hillary's history-making run as a woman.

Hillary, however, voted for the Iraq War. Who knows what Obama would have done if he'd been in her place? However, he wasn't. He's in a much better position to hammer home his differences with Bush & Co.

The last eight years have wreaked havoc on the U.S.'s world-wide reputation. Too many people hate us, fear us--and for what? A war designed to enrich Bush & Cheney's corporate friends in the face of killing, maiming and displacing millions of human beings. If we elect Barack Obama, Americans are telling the world that we don't support this.

Along those lines, look at what this New York Times piece says about foreign reaction to Obama's clinching the nomination:

Indeed, for many, the idea of an African-American in the White House for the first time seemed a concept that could potentially presage a profound shift in America’s sense of itself.

Gerard Baker, the U.S. editor of The Times of London, wrote: “In 220 years a country that has steadily multiplied in diversity, where ethnic minorities and women have risen to the very highest positions in so many fields of human life, has chosen a succession of 42 white men as its leader. For good measure, the vice presidency, the only other nationally directly elected position in the US government, has been held by a succession of 46 white males.”

“But last night, in a tumultuous break with this long history, the ultimate realization of the American dream moved a little closer, and a black man became his party’s nominee for the presidency,” Mr. Baker wrote.

Ségolène Royal, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Socialist rival in last year’s French presidential election, called Mr. Obama’s candidacy “a historic choice.”

“He embodies the America of today and tomorrow,” she said Wednesday. Ms. Royal, who attended an Obama rally in Boston on Feb. 1, said his consistent opposition to the war in Iraq could help mend America’s battered image in the world. “He had a lucid judgment of the war in Iraq.”
. . .

“It should bring a good change in relations with Pakistan” should he win the presidency, said Munaway Akhtar, a prominent lawyer specializing in international arbitration in the capital, Islamabad. “Pakistan has always been friendly to the United States but the people have never benefited, the rulers have always benefited. Hopefully, that would change with Obama.”

There was a prevailing sentiment, he said, that Mr. Obama would better serve Pakistan’s interests. “If Obama would become president there would be a push for democracy in Pakistan.”

A former senior Pakistani diplomat, who was briefly ambassador to the United States, Tariq Fatemi, said that Mr. Obama’s “idealism” struck a chord with Pakistanis.

“Barack Obama would do very well in improving the image of the United States. He would position the United States more as a force for moral values rather than for brute force,” he said.

That sense of optimism emerged in Hong Kong’s financial district.
“I feel his image is younger, fresher and more energetic, with no baggage and a shorter history,” said Richard Law, 50, a lawyer.

Across Europe, Mr. Obama’s announcement was seen through the prism of national interest. In Kosovo, whose birth as an independent country in February won strong support from the United States, political observers said that both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain would be embraced by the territory’s ethnic Albanian majority, since both supported Kosovo’s self-determination.

In Denmark, which supported the invasion of Iraq before withdrawing its troops amid a growing domestic backlash, Matias Seidelin, the political editor of the newspaper Politiken, said Mr. Obama was widely seen as the candidate who could repair America’s damaged reputation.

“Obama is viewed a multilateralist who favors dialogue in his foreign policy,” he said.

Mr. Seidelin said Mr. Obama’s s multiethnic background could foster understanding between cultures in the United States and other countries.

In Germany, where newspapers and broadcasters have been fascinated by the United States election campaign, several politicians and commentators have referred to Mr. Obama as the new John F. Kennedy, expressing fervent hope that he will be make it to the White House not only because of his youth and background but also as radical departure from the Bush administration.

Reinhardt Bütikofer, leader of Germany’s Green Party, said the election was of crucial importance for democracy. “I think this is a major historical moment,” he said. “And it came about against all the odds. What is most exciting is how Obama has been able to mobilize younger voters. This is one of the most important aspects. He can always be proud of that.”

The enthusiasm was also clear among conservative politicians, such as Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the foreign policy spokesman for the Christian Social Union, the sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats.

If Mr. Obama becomes president, “a transatlantic honeymoon will take place which will reach its climax at the next NATO summit which will be held both in Germany and France. We will reach a new peak of transatlantic romanticism,” he said.

“The dreams of Germans are connected with a renaissance of multilateralism, to which Obama is committed.”

In Brussels, Jan Marinus Wiersma, vice president of the Socialist Group, which has 216 seats in the European Parliament, was equally exuberant: “Mr. Obama represents an agenda for change for which we in Europe are longing. We hope and expect Mr. Obama to win. This will be the start of a new era of positive cooperation between the U.S. and Europe.”

In Switzerland, Miriam Behrens, the spokesperson for Switzerland’s Green Party, said, “Among the general public there is a tendency to support Obama. He’s perceived as a person who’s very charismatic and he’s more open to a European approach to things. That’s very much appreciated here.”

Some Europeans expressed caution about the outcome of the November election. “It’s clear that to affirm this change, there would have to be a victory in November, which isn’t at all certain,” said Mario Del Pero, who teaches American history at the University of Bologna in Italy. But Margherita Boniver, of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Party of Freedom, said an Obama victory in November “would be a moment of great liberation, of the overcoming of many millenary prejudices” whose impact would spread to the entire world.

Nikos Karahalios, a top strategist of the ruling New Democracy Party in Greece, said the government in Athens “isn’t playing the Republican or Democratic card game. But Greece, a small country struggling to make its mark in international affairs, has always had a history of siding by the underdog. That’s what Obama is. That’s why he’s appealing to the Greeks.”
He also evoked expectations that Mr. Obama could soften the anti-Americanism that has flowed from the Iraq war. “How well Mr. Obama rebrands America is crucial for Greece. It will determine how Greeks position themselves vis-à-vis the United States,” Mr. Karahalios said.

The American campaign has been closely followed in Baghdad, where politicians have tended to judge their American counterparts by reference to their stance on and knowledge of the Iraq war.

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Mahmoud Othman, a prominent member of Kurdish alliance in Parliament, said: “It is a matter related to the American people. I have preferred Clinton to be the candidate because she is more concerned about the Iraqi issue and the Kurdish issue especially. In general, I think it is good for the Americans because they want a change. They want a new administration since Obama represents the youth and he wants change.”

And since Obama is now the nominee, here's a poem in honor of him:

Paula Gunn Allen

"I have noticed that as soon as you have soldiers the story is called history. Before their arrival it is called myth, folktale, legend, fairy tale, oral poetry, ethnography. After the soldiers arrive, it is called history. " - Paula Gunn Allen.

Paula Gunn Allen, the revolutionary lesbian Native American and Lebanese writer, teacher and cultural historian passed away of lung cancer on May 29.

More information on Paula Gunn Allen here and here.

Two poems by Paula Gunn Allen:

Some Like Indians Endure

dykes remind me of indians
like indians dykes
are supposed to die out
or forget
or drink all the time
or shatter
go away
to nowhere
to remember what will happen
if they dont

they dont
anyway
even though it
happens
and they remember
they dont

because the moon remembers
because so does the sun
because so do the stars
remember
and the persistent stubborn
grass
of the earth

*

Weed

She stood, a weed tall in the sun.
She grew like that and went
over it again and again trying to be tall
trying not to die in the drying sun
the seeming turbulence of waiting
the sun so yellow
so still

There was nothing else to do. It was like that
in her day, and the sun who rose so bright
so full of fire reminded her of that.
It was the sun that did it; it was the rain.
She stood it all, and more:
the water pounding from the high rock face
of the mesas that made her yard
she knew where she was growing. Didn't
she know what sun will do, what happens to weeds
when their growing time's done? Didn't she care?
She got the sun into her, though.
The fire. She drank the rain for fuel.
She stood there in the day, growing,
trying to stand tall like a right weed would.

The drying was part of it.
The dying. Come from heat, the transformation
of fire. The rain helped because it understood
why she just stood there, growing,
tall in the heat and bright.

In which I answer questions like: "How do you see lady death?"

Farideh Hasanzadeh-Mostafavi, a poet who lives in Iran, has just published an interview with me here.

Ishmael Reed Presents

Our last event (whew!) of the season is tonight, when Ishmael Reed presents poets published by his publishing company: Boadiba, Karla Brundage, Neli Moody & Tennessee Reed.

This free event is today (Thursday) at 7 p.m. in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, Second Floor.

Ishmael Reed—novelist, poet, playwright and essayist—has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, Konch literary magazine, and his own publishing company.

Boadiba is a Haitian poet and translator. Her performances mix fragments of traditional sacred Haitian songs with original poetry.

In Swallowing Watermelons, Karla Brundage tracks her life experiences as a biracial woman, a single mother and an artist activist. She has lived in Hawaii , New York and Zimbabwe .

Neli Moody, author of After Altamira, is a lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at SJSU. She was awarded the Virgnia de Araujo Award and the Marjorie Folendorf Award for outstanding achievement in creative writing.

Tennessee Reed is the author of four poetry collections and a forthcoming memoir, Spell Albuquerque . She has traveled extensively throughout the U.S., Europe and Japan. A graduate of U.C. Berkeley and Mills College , she is running for the Oakland School Board, District One.

In German

My friend and mentor, Gabriele Rico, has translated my poem "Elephant" into German for a book she's doing about angels in poetry.

When I see her tomorrow, she's going to read it aloud to me. I can't wait to hear it.

Elefant

Ueber deinem Ruecken den Hauch des Wassers zu spueren,
dir vom Gesicht die Huegel-getrocknete Erde zu waschen,
von Elefanten zu traeumen, Ohren gespreitzt

wie die zerknitterten Fluegel eines uralten Engels.
An den Baptismus von der Natur zu glauben,
Dich in den Verlust von Allem zu vertiefen—

nicht nur in den Deiner Mutter, nicht nur deines Liebhabers,
doch auch den Deines Gottes. Es ist alles
Nichts in dem kurzen Grass,

es ist nur das Nichts der Luft—
wir erinnern uns wie Elefanten, dann verschwinden wir
endgueltig.

Wir verwehen nicht auf dem Atem des Loewenzahnes,
"Wir fahren nicht aufwaerts. Wir landen. Fest wie Steine,
in Huegeln begraben, unbeweglich und stumm."

(by Kate Evans, translated by Gabriele Rico)

Red Morning

For those of you looking to submit your poetry manuscripts, Red Morning Press is now in its open reading period.

Red Morning Press requires no submission fee. Imagine that! This submission fee/poetry contest thing has gotten out of hand. I understand that small presses need to raise funds, but there is such a flood of fee-required contests in the market right now.

And what so often happens is that people whose work isn't quite ready spend a lot of money submitting work that doesn't have a chance. Contests that allow unlimited numbers of submissions (with a fee for each one, of course) end up making money on the backs of naive neophytes.

So for newer writers, I suggest reading a lot, writing a lot, and getting feedback from people you trust, either a mentor or a writing group. Get it really good before you bother spending time and money sending work out. Better yet, get it really good then submit to journals and small presses that require no fee.

Passings

"With the passing of its editor, Raymond J. Smith, Ontario Review itself will cease publication with the forthcoming Spring 2008 issue. Smith began Ontario Review in 1974 in Windsor, Ontario, with his wife Joyce Carol Oates as associate editor..."

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Yesterday I talked to my students a little bit about my process of writing poetry. I read aloud a few of my poems and almost read one about my father, but I decided against it because I wasn't sure I could make it through since (as I wrote in the last entry) yesterday was the one-year mark of my his death.

So I'll post it here, in his memory. (This poem appears in Like All We Love.)

What My Father Gives

The doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists come in
with vials and clipboards and white or black shoes, pushing

buttons like astronauts, speaking words I don’t know. My father’s
lungs are failing, they’ve been failing a long time, twenty-five

years of failing, and I’ve lived my whole life as though I’m not dying.
They’ve asked my mom to take off his wedding band, to pull it off

his finger after forty-seven years, her own fingers white as bone,
his as red as the crushed velvet bedspread on my growing-up bed,

in the room of our new house where my dad built the redwood decks
around the oaks to save them, the house where we had rules like draw

the drapes when the sun shines in the living room so the carpet
won’t fade, like take off your shoes in the entry so you don’t

track in dirt, and when that didn’t work, walk only on the plastic
runners. Those runners had little rubber prongs that dug into the

carpet to stay put, and sometimes I’d turn them over and walk on the
prongs barefoot for a pleasing pinch of the feet. My sister and I

had our own rooms with big windows that looked out onto blue oak
and manzanita and ghost pine. One night I woke to an owl sitting

on a limb at my window. I turned on my light to see her better, but
of course the window turned opaque. Raccoons and possums

fell into the pool, and my dad fished them out with the leaf skimmer,
its handle curving with dead weight. When he started coughing,

I can see now, he was still young, not much older than I am now.
He drove my sister and me to school, one of us folded in the backseat

of his sports car that didn’t really have a backseat. As he shifted gears,
spots of coffee would jump out of his ceramic mug, and the cold morning

air made his cough worse. Around then, the time of the blue sports car,
he started hooking up to a machine in the morning and again at night,

then lying on a slant board for my mom to pound his back and chest
so he’d cough up the phlegm his lungs refused to clear by themselves.

He wears flannel shirts and Birkenstocks, has a full head of dark
hair, just a little gray, and a handlebar mustache they shaved in the

hospital so they could tape still the tubes. When they pulled the tape away,
when he unexpectedly lived, we saw they had shaved only above the lip

so his handlebars remained, unanchored. He has crystal blue eyes that turn
bloodshot when he coughs and coughs, and with my mom on a trip, I’m the one

who pounds him, and when we finish, cleans the machine. I throw out
the fluids still warm from his body, clean the machine with dish soap. Then

I make him breakfast, and he asks for more strawberries or hotter coffee,
and a glass of water in a short glass, not tall. He knocks over the tall ones.

My mother has taken a group trip to the other side of the continent. My father
insists on coming to the airport to pick her up, even though it’s cold and late.

When she comes through the gate, her small folded body, her hair cloud-white,
I think she can see that nothing has changed, that my father still wheels his

oxygen, and they kiss. On the trip she met an eighty-three year old woman
who still teaches second grade and who lives in a Manhattan apartment,

and my mom is astonished that some people live their whole lives unlike us,
no backyards or garages or leaf-strewn decks. Ten years ago I fell in love

with a woman, and it seemed an apocalypse, like an atomic blast cremated
the house, incinerated the formal dining room. I was stubborn. There was no

middle ground. My parents grasped at me like the string of a kite in a fierce wind.
My love and I married this February, when the mayor of San Francisco decided

to break the law, and afterward my parents took us to dinner, held up glasses
of wine, rubied in gold candlelight. When we thought he was going to die,

when his breath was like a crack in a sidewalk, my father told my love
that she is like a daughter to him. I saw him holding onto that bed, dying

in his living as he has for years. I have lived as though death belongs to him.
He has owned it for me. That is what he wants, I now see, my immortality.

A Literary Couple

What a contrast: she writes poetry, and he writes about serial killers.

Kimiko Hahn and Harold Schechter are a fascinating, kind and generous literary couple who've been visiting us from New York for the past two days (they both teach at SUNY, Queens College).

Kimiko gave talks and readings on Wednesday and Harold last night.

Kimiko told me--kind of tongue-in-cheek--that it was necrophelia that brought them together. She had been teaching the book by Jeffery Dahmer's father in one of her frosh courses. When someone told Harold--the author of many historical books about psychopaths--what his colleague was up to, he just had to talk to her. (Kimiko was teaching the Dahmer book because she knew there were some frosh who'd never read a book the whole way through, and her goal was to find a book they wouldn't put down.)

Kimiko's poetry is fresh and intriguing. In her past two collections, she's been playing around with her own version of the zuihitsu, which she says is like a fungus: a fungus is its own species (neither plant nor animal) and a zuihitsu is also its own thing, not really poetry or prose. It's random thoughts woven around an organizing principle. It's miscellany, sort of stream-of-consciousness, and can contain lists and fragments. It's intuitive, illogical, spontaneous, ambiguous, contradictory and playful.

Harold is interested in the mythical creation of "monsters" in popular culture (including popular culture of the 19th century). He's written a whole series of books about murders that became famous in their day, exploring why certain crimes ignite the imagination (while others that may be even "more horrible" drop away from the headlines).

Harold wrote an episode of Law & Order about a (homosexual) murderer whose defense involves that he was influenced by television violence. (I

don't watch the show, but I figure someone out there who reads this may have.)

Being around both of them has been fun and inspiring. I'm now ready to attack my own writing today.

And Next Week, Poet Kimiko Hahn

Next week Kimiko Hahn visits us at SJSU.

Her most recent collection, The Narrow Road to the Interior, is a surprising, intriguing mix of prose and lineated fragments that weave together, to my ear, in a surprisingly holistic way.

She draws on, "and even reinvents, classic forms and techniques used by women writers in Japan and China, including the zuihitsu, or pillow book, and nu shu, a nearly extinct script Chinese women used to correspond with one another."

Hahn was born in 1955 in Mt. Kisco, New York, the child of artists, a Japanese American mother from Hawaii and a German American father from Wisconsin.

She is a Distinguished Professor in the English department at Queens College/CUNY and has won a ton of awards.

But let's cut to the chase. Here are two of her poems:

*****************

The Razor

I want to return to the moment
father and I brought the canister of mother's ashes
to the temple in some odd shopping bag.
We then dropped off the remains
to leave for a couple slices down the block
but the reverend pulled a robe
over her jeans and blouse,
picked up prayer beads
and suggested which was not a question
we say a sutra. Which one was it?
I only recall I didn't have a tissue;
that the incense which I so dislike
felt sweet wafting into my sweater
and hair; that my whole body
shook without pause
though I did not make a sound
and tears and mucus covered my face and
sleeves because father did not know
I needed the handkerchief
mother had pressed a week earlier.
At times the loss felt like an organ
one could excise with a razor.


Wax
Initial Correspondence to L . . .

i.
I am looking for clues
on how to stay a woman, not
a middle-aged woman
who sings all those girl-group lyrics
over the dash
but a woman since
I've earned that title over years of (honey, you know — )
wicked repartees
among my girlfriends and boyfriends.
Here's the subtext:
the twenty-year-olds
at poetry readings
are so exquisite they might be
fashioned of wax, even
the blemishes. I realize now
how lithe I was when I thought
I was the ugly daughter — how
tremulous my beauty. I didn't know.
I just knew
I wanted to fuck my professor
(Chaucer 8:30 am M/W)
and boys from Chinese History
wearing blue caps. Nixon
was still President.
The war was nearly over.
And the young now listen
to fifty-year-old rockers.
No wonder they don't think
they invented sex. Fuckin-A
we did.
And what I want at some moment
in my forties
is not an affair —
that would rip my breast open —
I would like to wrap my arms around a guy
(I guess a guy)
for a lengthy kiss.
Standing up. In the dark.
Pulse at the boiling point
one recalls
from those irretrievable initial encounters.
L, send me advice quick.

ii.
waxing

iii.
I send these words to you
across the frozen continent,
through waning light
and steam rising off rivers.


(c) Kimiko Hahn. All rights reserved.

Letters to the World

Got this in the mail today: a collection of poetry from 259 contributors in 19 countries. Red Hen Press is impressive. This is truly the most elegant book in which my poetry has ever appeared. (My poem "Middle Age," which originally appeared in Like All We Love, is included.)

Hot Metal Press

(Art by Carolina Battista Sineni)

My poem "My Father's Ashes" now appears in the new issue of Hot Metal Press. I'm honored to be in such a gorgeous issue filled with so many fine poems.

Lately I've been reading . . .

W.H. Auden, poet, prophet, provocateur. Here are three poems.

Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

*

The Question

All of us believe
we were born of a virgin
(for who can imagine

his parents copulating?)
and cases are known
of pregnant Virgins.

But the Question remains:
from where did Christ get
that extra chromosome?

*

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Letters to the World

This gorgeous book (which includes one of my poems) will be released February 1 by Red Hen Press. Here's the lowdown:

Letters to the World is the first anthology of its kind—a feminist collaboration born from The Discussion of Women’s Poetry Listserv (Wom-po), a vibrant, inclusive electronic community founded in 1997 by Annie Finch. With an introduction by D’Arcy Randall and brief essays by the poets themselves reflecting on the history and spirit of the listserv, the book presents a rich array of viewpoints and poems. Letters to the World is a remarkable example of how the Internet has radically rearranged associations among poets, editors, and readers.

Ribbons of Sky

Ribbons of Sky

for Kate and Annie

Who can beat the beauty

of this slow ribboning of sky

stacked blue on gray soon yellow

now peach in deep December

highlighted in one window wet

with color winking green all straight-up

lucky bamboo stalking skyward

overlooking sweet-red wilted autumn

stored still in red vinca geranium

whose pink dendrobium orchid neighbor

quietly wildly partners with winter?

--Al Young

December 16, 2007

* * *

I'm honored to say that California Poet Laureate Al Young wrote the above gorgeous poem for Annie and me. When we returned from Hawaii, I shared my photos with him--and he serendipitiously realized this photo of a sunset on the Big Island is a perfect match for the poem.

Check out Al's great new website here.