Could This Happen On AMERICA's Version?

Dear Editor:

Something does not compute. An article in Sunday's (6/10/07) Mercury News about the San Jose Book Group Expo pointed out that most readers and buyers of books are women.

In this same edition of the paper, the five books reviewed were all authored by men--and the reviews themselves were written by men. Please consider more balance in your approach.

Thank you,
Kate Evans

Poets and Rushdie

See: Five Poets You Should Be Reading . . . I'm honored to be on this list!

(Another poet you should be reading: the guy who wrote the list, Collin Kelley.)

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Last night at Bookshop Santa Cruz I saw Ellen Bass and Phyllis Koestenbaum read. As you know from a previous post, I'm a big fan of Ellen's, and last night she did not disappoint. Her new book is brilliant, funny, and deeply moving. And her delivery makes the poems pop in the air.

I'd never before heard Phyllis. She's fascinating. It seems like she's relentless in pushing herself to try new things. She read some fragments and some very long poems.

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I'm reading The Satanic Verses. So far? Pretty damn funny, a romp. I keep thinking, someone wanted to kill him for this? Generally, I'm not big on satire (since I like my literature a bit more character-driven and sincere), but I am carried away by the sheer exuberance of Rushdie's writing.

Besides, Rushdie is visiting our campus in the fall, so I figured I better catch up . . . this novel has been gathering dust in my "published in 1988" pile.

Life Stories and Conny

Check out "fifteen paying markets for personal essays and life stories."

That's where I learned about Common Ties, which just took one of my pieces. I'm being paid (an amount I can't disclose), and they've asked me to record a reading of so people both read and listen to my piece online.

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If you can't or don't want to sell a personal piece, a great place to get some readership is Drumtable. I've posted a few of my pieces on Drumtable, here. While they don't directly pay, you have a shot at getting a $50-100 prize for "best piece of the week."


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I can't decide if this is beautiful or creepy:

Poetry Monday: Lorna Dee Cervantes

Lorna Dee and her musician brother Steve

Back in the early 1990's, Lorna Dee Cervantes was a guest speaker in a class I was taking at San Jose State. I was moved by her passion for life, for poetry, for social justice--and her tender-edged images of California. I still have my signed copy of her first poetry collection, Emplumada. So much great poetry in that book--and I especially love the pairing of "Barco de Refugiados" with the English version "Refugee Ship."

In April, Lorna Dee and I--along with a number of other poets--read at an SJSU poetry event (for more about that, read here). I remember thinking it was too bad she no longer lived in the Bay Area. But now, amazingly, she's in the process of moving back! She talks about that below.

Also below she riffs on her creative process and the writing of the two poems featured below: "Untitled (Pfeiffer Beach)" and "Untitled (Monterey)."

Lorna Dee says:
These two poems are a pair. They come out of the same place, literally and existentially. I wrote them last week, on a trip "home" after 20 years away, returning to Pfeiffer Beach where my ex of that many years and I used to camp. The whole Monterey Bay, point of first contact with the Europeans, my native land. And now the smell of the invasive alien eucalyptus penetrating my senses and taking me back to there with the sound of pounding surf, to it all, an early lifetime of living--and loving.

I was seeing and hearing it all for the first time again; a whole shelled pecan returning to the nutcase; a state of just looking and not even attempting to remember and re-present it, to try and jump back in, to try and fit into it.

I'd gone to a used and rare book store in Monterey, a narrow walled high-ceiling place with trippy antique wall-paper with drawings of frustrated writers, or so they seemed to me. I found a copy of Zbigniew Herbert, a poet I had read in a literally translated version without stanzas or form when I was a teenager, and love him. It seemed to fit this state of returning (I'm planning to relocate "back home" to the Bay Area.)

After 20 years away ("kantum sung"), the Colorado transplant never quite took. I'm still in a rootball and easy to pull. These are very much poems of place, in that homing wolf sort of way of Brother Antoninus (William Everson) by way of Robinson Jeffers by way of the women of Point Lobos, the native and Californio women — like me.

I was back in a land where I know the names of things. "A product of affection and imagination." Robert Hass, Bob, my "guru" of many years said this in relation to the economics of certain types of free markets involving predilective labor. I believe he intends it to apply to poetry, the magic of a good poem that just happens; happens upon you, rather than you making it or making it happen. Ouija board poetry is how I sometimes think of it. Not exactly automatic writing, or channelling. As Bob says of poetry, "poetry is much wilder than that" and I'm not in charge nor are there dictates. Just a state of free dwelling in affection and imagination, and a rhythm, a cadence, a voice and a voicing — as a constant, for how ever long it lasts, like setting the top to spin, then sitting back and observing it.

If there's anything I learned from my gurus, my poetry teachers: Rose Higashi, Sylvia Gonzalez, Virginia de Araujo, Robert Hass, Naomi Clark, Stanley Kunitz, it's: pay attention.

Every poem discovers its own process.

That line came to me just now the way the first line of the first poem came to me, with the (seeming) power of a visionary dream: Every ending finds its own beginning. This had enormous personal meaning to me regarding my own state of mind and circumstance as a being at a crossroads, and conscious of it. I decided to sleep on it, and write the poem the next day. And I'm glad I did. It would have been a different poem, then. Before the influence of the Herbert, his 3 poems of heart poem in particular, it would have been a lesser poem, I think. But like a choice of lovers, who knows? Eh? I guess you just have to live with it, the final choice, with affection and imagination.

Someone said the first line and a half, (my catalytic line!) and the last line and a half (my attempt to save my line from triteness) were trite, and not worthy of the rest of the poem. Ouch. That might be true. It's like having an ugly child, I imagine. Mine has always been beautiful, so, who knows? It wouldn't be the poem it is without it, I think. Maybe, like falling in love with someone a bit unsuitable, too late now.

I had been working on the final form of my new 220 page collection of love poems, Una poca de gracia/ Bit of Grace, and conscious of how I wanted these new poems to fit in, like filler for the holes in the dike. I had found a poem of mine from my second book called Point Lobos and now, in the rereading and reconsidering, it seemed convoluted, and I pulled it from the book. But I needed a Point Lobos poem. Or, poems.

I was riffing on some earlier Santa Cruz poems, and earlier love poems that were published in my first book, Emplumada, published when I was 24. A good year for loving the love of your life. Both poems were written in a day, a day apart, and all in a single sitting. Something else's hands were guiding the pen, someone else's voice was speaking through me. I wrote what I heard and broke the line when I was led to it. Then I typed and carved like the sea does to the land at Point Lobos, especially at the first which didn't seem "it" until I broke it into quatrains, unfinished, and unresolved, in the end.

I tried to sustain this state of consciousness, of seeing, into the week with a series of poems, but there was too much to do, too much to say and people to say it to, that I wrote no more. I wrote one I started the next day, "Untitled (Whaler's Cove)" (which is the title), and tried to finish it yesterday, thinking of it, and these poems, and this bit of writing here.

Y'all tell me if it was successful. Maybe these poems are just the pair.

Both poems are being submitted to Ocho #10, "Untitled (Monterey)" at the request of Didi Menendez, so it might appear in there soon. Otherwise, the pair were posted on my home blog and and at the CafeCafe blog at facebook. Hosted by Didi, it includes lots of very good poets, with very good comments, and that inspires me. It always inspires me to read good poetry. Besides, they also offer monthly challenges, and I like the practice of writing to form or writing occasional poems inspired by something outside of me.

I've spent so many decades writing out of another way, out of Frost's perpetual "lump in the throat" that I like it, it's a form, a practice of not-doing. As Kunitz says, poetry is a kind of order/a kind of folly. Yes. And, a way of saying, "YES".


Untitled (Pfeiffer Beach)

Lavender clings to the cliff.
I left this long ago. Yellow
lupine slings her slipper, small moss
hands shiver in the stilled wind. Hello
past. Goodbye fading future into
now. The eternity of the sea waves
her saludos. Sometimes something slips
and the cracked pawl skips, the sawing
away at my face slows for an instant
and I see. Summer sludges up the hill
as the sun burns through until
frost. And here I am. Not hurrying.
Breathing in the medicine breath of eucalyptus
as the hillsides burst into the many erections
of horse chestnuts, their flagrant white
penises trumping the bees. We called them
Coyote Trees, Trickster bushes, always changing
shape. The shape-shifters along this path I'm on
beckon. The whole world beckons. And I'm traveling
on.

6/1/07

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UNTITLED (Monterey)

Every ending finds its own
beginning, the broken beetle curled
into its hovel, the leaves and leavings
of the world gone crisp. All of it

in a loop of sense, the still burning,
and its ash. The seed in me
bears wings, nubbins to the last.
I take the last oranges on the wiry stem,

the then and now expurgated in its scent.
And remember you, my face, my mirror,
my tunneling in the remembrance — a sprig
of bouganvillea, vibrant and calling

the memory home: a memory of home,
or some kind of smoke, a haze
over days, and, the dissipation.
I believe that the butterfly finds

its lost scale, all the scuffled dust
that keeps it aloft. I believe that what
sleeps in its hollowed den wakens
and feeds, and needs the nuzzlings

it finds there. I believe that the sea
in its spiral cage looks out the cephalopod's
wake. All of spring in its burgeoning fate
repeats. And I am. Repeating. I am.

And I'm not. And I wait.

5/31/07

Lorna Dee Cervantes (visit her blog here) is a Chumash Xicana poet/printer/professor now living in Berkeley, preparing her book of new and selected love poems for publication, and finishing a screenplay and writing a novel this summer. She is also completing a nonfiction book, Ganesh's Tusk: Towards a Pedagogy of Poetics on writing, writing practices and the theories of teaching creative writing. The recipient of numerous awards, honors & fellowships, Lorna Dee is an Associate Professor of English at CU Boulder where she teaches Chicana and Black Studies courses for Ethnic Studies, and mentored 45 creative writing students in 18 years.

A Must-See: Women in Art

Writing Wisdom

"There are three rules for writing novels. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are." (Somerset Maugham)


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Come back Monday for an exciting and exclusive Poetry Monday: two poems with commentary about those poems by a terrific poet. Many of you probably already know her work and will appreciate her insights.

Seducing the Demon

I'm currently devouring Erica Jong's Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, which I bought at Winston Smith, Auburn's very cool downtown used bookstore.

Here a few gems I've found so far:

An Icon's Retort

'"Let me kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses,' some abject fan once asked James Joyce. 'You don't know where else it's been,' Joyce countered."

Writing the Book

"Henry Miller used to say that he wrote fifty pages before he could hear the book's 'fetal heartbeat.'"

Sex and the 70's

"The early seventies was all about the clitoris. The clitoris was queen. It was impossible to escape the seventies without climbing over the clitoris. Apparently, for centuries men had been unable to find it. And women were pissed."

Advice from Anne Sexton

"Once, when I wrote to [Anne] about my terror of publishing a second book of poems, she answered: Don't dwell on the book's reception. The point is to get on with it--you have a life's work ahead of you--no point in dallying around waiting for approval. We all want it, I know, but the point is to reach out honestly--that's the whole point. I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any of us--or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem--a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer--it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem. You have the gift--and with it comes responsibility--you musn't neglect or be mean to that gift--you must let it do its work. It has more rights than the ego that wants approval."

Better Than Prosac

I've now been with Mom for almost two weeks, helping her get back on her feet (literally and metaphorically) after my father's death. We now have two aides--two wonderfully caring and efficient women--who come to help her out mornings and evenings, setting Mom up to feel safe and cared for when I go back home.

This morning while the caretaker was with Mom, I went on a walk with my dog Max, my ipod on shuffle. The first song immediately lifted me up from listless to flying because of the beat--and because of a specific memory. When I was teaching in Japan, I'd blast this song and dance with all the five-year-olds, the music transcending our language and cultural barriers.



Then, serendipitiously as I was walking by my old high school (I graduated in 1980) this song came on. I could almost smell pot in the air.



Next came my favorite Indigo Girls song--love that Amy's raspy voice. It reminded me of one of the eight or so times we saw them in concert. We were sitting in the front row, and when Amy played the first note of this song I almost yelled out the song's title but chickened out, doubting myself. But then they launched into the song, and I kicked myself. I'm sure they would have been so impressed with a fan who could name one of their tunes in one note that they would have invited me on stage and given me kisses.




Great way to start my day. Now Mom and I are off to a bookstore. I want to wander among books, smell them, linger on a page, a cover, here and there. Books and music. Life is good.

Hot Oprah Day

My sister alerted me that Michael Moore was going to be on Oprah today, so after I took Mom to her doctor's appointment, we watched it together. Moore was great. He kept hammering home that it's absurd that our medical system is for-profit because it benefits financially from withholding and denying treatment.

Following Moore, Oprah interviewed Cormac McCarthy. I'm sure McCarthy aficionados were squirming on their couches, watching their idol demean himself by appearing on a popular TV show--no, this popular TV show. Those aficionados need to get over themselves because obviously McCarthy thought he'd be getting something out of it (like the book sales he feigns disinterest in). And now Oprah's ubiquitous sticker now adorns paperback copies of The Road.

And her summer reading pick? Jeffrey Eugenedies' Middlesex. (A great read.)


I bet Jonthan Franzen is kicking himself.

Poetry Monday: Ellen Bass

If you've never read the whole of Mules of Love by Ellen Bass' , you're in for a treat. I wish I could read it again for the first time. I've taught it several times in my creative writing classes, and Ellen has generously come to speak to my students about her work.

I've taken writing workshops with Ellen, and she is a gifted teacher. She has a way with saying just the right thing (and of letting silence do its important work too . . . in teaching and in writing, she's a master of negative space). She also has a great sense of humor!

Now Ellen has a new book out, The Human Line--just released by Copper Canyon Press. Look what Billy Collins says about The Human Line: "Ellen Bass's frighteningly personal poems about sex, love, birth, motherhood, and aging are kept from mere confession by the graces of wit, an observant eye, an empathetic heart, and just the right image deployed at just the right time. The Human Line is full of real stunners."

Below is "Bone of My Bone and Flesh of My Flesh," a poem from The Human Line. (Click here to read more poems from the book.)

And exclusive to this blog, here is some commentary by Ellen about the poem: Ellen says, "I was working on a poem in which I needed a word for Janet, the woman with whom I have lived, loved, and raised children for twenty-five years. Searching through an old thesaurus--I still use the thesaurus my older brother handed down to me, published in 1962--I came across such a wonderful plethora of words that I thought they deserved a poem of their own."

Bone of My Bone and Flesh of My Flesh (by Ellen Bass)

I can't always refer to the woman I love,

my children’s other mother,

as my darling, my beloved,

sugar in my bowl. No.

I need a common, utilitarian word

that calls no more attention to itself

than nouns like grass, bread, house.

The terms husband and wife are perfect for that.

Hassling with PG&E

or dropping off dry cleaning,

you don't want to say,

The light of my life doesn't like starch.

Don't suggest spouse—a hideous word.

And partner is sterile as a boardroom.

Couldn't we afford a term

for the woman who carried that girl in her arms

when she was still all promise,

that boy curled inside her womb?

And today, when I go to kiss her

and she says, "Not now, I'm reading,"

still she deserves a syllable or two—if only

so I can express how furious

she makes me. But

maybe it's better this way —

no puny pencil stub of a word.

Maybe these are exactly the times

to drag out the whole galaxy

of endearments: Buttercup,

I should say, lambkin, mon petit chou.

Set down War and Peace,

just for a moment, and lift

your ruby lips to mine.

And talking to the dishwasher repairman,

the vacuum cleaner salesclerk, the woman

in the Blue Cross billing department

I could explain that I'd already sent the co-pay

for my soulmate, my duckling,

my chocolate-covered cream puff.

Maybe it would brighten her day, too.

Hello, I might say, you precious,

you jewel, O queen among queens,

darling, honey pie, angel,

my sweet patootie.

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Ellen Bass's poetry books include The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002). She is also co-author of The Courage to Heal (HarperCollins). She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University, in Santa Cruz, and at beautiful locations around the world, including Big Sur, British, Columbia, and Mallorca.

Happy Pride Month

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

--Walt Whitman