The Mark on the Wall

The Morning reading: "Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.""

2012-02-01T07:35:00.000-08:00

February
by Margaret Atwood

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

*

The Sunday Review: "A Supermarket in Arizona"

2012-01-29T11:09:00.000-08:00

In his second weekly OC Bookly column, at the OC Weekly, Andrew Tonkovich posts a wide-ranging review of Chapman professor Tom Zoellner's new book A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells us about the Grand Canyon State and Life in America.

excerpt:

What famous American asked: "What is government if words have no meaning?"

Multiple choice: a) Warren Zevon b) Situationist philosopher Guy Debord c) Newt Gingrich d) Stephane Hessel e) Jared Lee Loughner.

Okay, only three are even Americans. And if you chose everything but "e" you're forgiven. But as journalist Tom Zoellner, lately teaching at Chapman University points on in his newest book, A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells us about the Grand Canyon State and Life in America, the mentally ill Arizona assassin himself offered this actual interrogative at, yes, a public forum years before he arrived at the now-iconic supermarket parking lot to shoot Giffords in the brain with his Glock 19.

To read the rest, click here.

*

The Morning Reading: "I can't be human after all."

2012-01-28T05:54:00.000-08:00

Wooden
by Kay Ryan

In the presence of supple
goodness, some people
grow less flexible,
experiencing a woodenness
they wouldn't have thought possible.
It is as strange and paradoxical
as the combined suffering
of Pinocchio and Geppetto
if Pinocchio had turned and said,
I can't be human after all.

*

with thanks to the beauty we love

*

UC Riverside 35th Annual Writers Week: February 7-10

2012-01-26T05:49:00.000-08:00

The longest running free literary event in California is worth the drive if you have the kind of life that allows you to wander away during the traditional work week - or at least play a little hooky.

Tuesday-Friday February 7-10

UC Riverside

Writers include: Charmaine Craig, Ben Ehrenreich, Michael Jaime-Beccera, Susan Straight, B.H. Fairchild, Frank Gaspar, Garret Hongo and many others, including Diane Wakoski as Keynote reader.

Check out their schedule by clicking here.

Free and open to the public.

*

The Morning Reading: "Some books haunt the reader. Others haunt the writer. "The Handmaid's Tale" has done both."

2012-01-24T08:55:00.000-08:00

Margaret Atwood, writing in The Guardian, about her novel, The Handmaid's Tale:

excerpt:

Some books haunt the reader. Others haunt the writer. The Handmaid's Tale has done both.

The Handmaid's Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations and editions. It has become a sort of tag for those writing about shifts towards policies aimed at controlling women, and especially women's bodies and reproductive functions: "Like something out of The Handmaid's Tale" and "Here comes The Handmaid's Tale" have become familiar phrases...

...I began this book almost 30 years ago, in the spring of 1984, while living in West Berlin – still encircled, at that time, by the Berlin Wall. The book was not called The Handmaid's Tale at first – it was called Offred – but I note in my journal that its name changed on 3 January 1985, when almost 150 pages had been written....

...I recall that I was writing by hand, then transcribing with the aid of a typewriter, then scribbling on the typed pages, then giving these to a professional typist: personal computers were in their infancy in 1985. I see that I left Berlin in June 1984, returned to Canada, wrote through the fall, then spent four months in early 1985 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I held an MFA chair. I finished the book there; the first person to read it was a fellow writer, Valerie Martin, who was also there at that time. I recall her saying: "I think you've got something here." She herself remembers more enthusiasm....

...I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the "Christian" tradition, itself. (I enclose "Christian" in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the church's behaviour and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organisation would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)...

...Three things that had long been of interest to me came together during the writing of the book. The first was my interest in dystopian literature, an interest that began with my adolescent reading of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley's Brave New World and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and continued through my period of graduate work at Harvard in the early 1960s. (Once you've been intrigued by a literary form, you always have a secret yen to write an example of it yourself.) The second was my study of 17th and 18th-century America, again at Harvard, which was of particular interest to me since many of my own ancestors had lived in those times and in that place. The third was my fascination with dictatorships and how they function, not unusual in a person who was born in 1939, three months after the outbreak of the second world war....

To read the rest, click here.

*

More Books Culture for Orange County!

2012-01-22T09:42:00.000-08:00

The OC Weekly, the county's free alternative newsweekly, has debuted a weekly books column - the OC Bookly, penned by Andrew Tonkovich - (the generous intro below is provided by Gustavo Arellano.)

excerpt:

Gentle readers: It gives me great pleasure to introduce our new weekly column on books, written by longtime Weekly contributor, UC Irvine egghead, and host of KPFK-FM 90.7's Bibliocracy Radio, Andrew Tonkovich! Every Sunday morning, Andrew will write about books written by Orange County authors or dealing with Orange County. Today, he gives us a quick reading list--now, without further ado, the Tonk!

Welcome to the Bibliofella's new weekly books blog for Orange County and beyond, a coffee klatch where I drink too much Joe and get overly excited about all the books you should be reading. Here reigns the dictatorship of the booklateriat, me, where I go on and on, but somehow still with brevity, wit and plenty of completely unsupportable claims about what I agree with myself about. Comments from readers? Well, if you insist, sure, why not? I have to warn you I am a real madcap, mercurial yet incredibly, charmingly persuasive.

Who knows: one week I might demand your support of a small, important avant-garde experiment. The following, I could easily pander to provincial middle-brow Orange County tastes, throwing you easy picks by way of our shared limits as regards geography and imagination. You decide. No, don't! I will, insisting on my own terrific opinions. Want to discuss a book you haven't read? Get your own blog. Call it "But I Saw the Movie." (A better name than this one's.)

For now let's synchronize our tastes, yours to the Bibliofella's. Embarking upon our maiden voyage on the S.S. Bookly, full steam ahead, I present a list of required OC literary reading: books you've read already and are conversant in, will purchase and read immediately, or simply buy and display on a shelf in your luxury home, condo, apartment or parents' living room now labeled, "The Bibliofella Recommends." (Send photos.)

Heads up: If you score "already read" on let's say half of these, consider yourself automatically enrolled in my book club. With membership comes an actual club you can use to beat on the head those who haven't, or only threaten them. Haven't read any at all? Read fast. Wear a helmet.

To read the rest (an overview of ten quintessential Orange County texts), check it out by clicking here.

*

The Morning Reading: "The wreck is a fact."

2012-01-22T05:44:00.000-08:00

Salvage
by Kay Ryan

The wreck
is a fact.
The worst
has happened.
The salvage trucks
back in and
the salvage men
begin to sort
and stack,
whistling as
they work.
Thanks be
to god—again—
for extractable elements
which are not
carriers of pain,
for this periodic
table at which
the self-taught
salvagers disassemble
the unthinkable
to the unthought.

*

The Morning Reading: "It is true that half the glory is gone."

2012-01-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

Salvage
by Robinson Jeffers

It is true that half the glory is gone.
Motors and modernist houses usurp the scene.
There is no eagle soaring, nor a puma
On the Carmel hill highroad. Where thirty years ago
We watched one pass. Yet by God's grace
I have still a furlong of granite cliff, on which the Pacific
Leans his wild weight; and the trees I planted
When I was young, little green whips in hand,
Have grown in despite of the biting sea-wind,
And are accepted by nature, an angry-voiced tribe of night-herons
Nests on the boughs. One has to pay for it;
The county taxes take all my income, and it seems ridiculous
To hold three acres of shorelong woodland
And the little low house that my own hands made, at the annual cost
Of a shiny new car. Never mind, the trees and stones are worth it.

But it's darker now. I am old, and my wife has died,
Whose eyes made life. As for me, I have to consider and take thought
Before I can feel the beautiful secret
In places and stars and stones, to her it came freely.
I wish that all human creatures might feel it.
That would make joy in the world, and make men perhaps a little nobler –
as a handful of wildflowers
Is nobler than the damned human race.

*

I was inspired this morning by an essay in the Los Angeles Times: "Robinson Jeffers, nature's oracle" by Christopher Cokinos.

I once enrolled in a Robinson Jeffers seminar at Cal State Long Beach taught by noted Jeffers scholar Dr. Robert Brophy. It was 1983 or so. I was about 23. I didn't "get" Jeffers and dropped the course. I get him now. I wish I could re-enroll.

*

Photograph by Robinson Jeffers by Ansel Adams.

*

The Morning Reading: "fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing"

2012-01-16T08:41:00.000-08:00

Frederick Douglass
by Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

*

The Morning Reading: "sweet honey from my old failures"

2012-01-14T05:36:00.000-08:00

Last night, as I was sleeping
Antonio Machado
(trans. by Robert Bly)

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt -- marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt -- marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt -- marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light.

Last night, as I slept,
I dreamt -- marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

*
(with thanks to Larry Ruth)
*
(image: detail from Picasso's "Sleeping Woman")

*

The Morning Reading: Kurt Vonnegut, teacher: “Full of life, Suzanne, and that’s all I ever ask of anyone.”

2012-01-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

Suzanne McConnell recently wrote in The Brooklyn Rail about her experiences as Kurt Vonnegut's student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in the mid-60s.

Some excerpts:

Delight:
In a Form of Fiction class (literature classes geared towards examining fiction from a writer's perspective, comprised of about eighty students), Kurt taught a Chekhov story. I can’t remember the name of it. I didn’t quite understand the point, since nothing much happened. An adolescent girl is in love with this boy and that boy and another; she points at a little dog, as I recall, or maybe something else, and laughs. That’s all. There’s no conflict, no dramatic turning point or change. Kurt pointed out that she has no words for the sheer joy of being young, ripe with life, her own juiciness, and the promise of romance. Her inarticulate feelings spill into laughter at something innocuous. That’s what happened in the story. His absolute delight in that girl’s joy of feeling herself so alive was so encouraging of delight. Kurt’s enchantment taught me that such moments are nothing to sneeze at. They’re worth a story.

...

In that class, among Kurt’s several assignments, was one to write a four-page essay on “the mechanical and spiritual limitations…imposed by the short story as compared with the novel.” Though a “grotesque and stupid thing to do,” he wrote, another was to describe in less than twenty-five words the plot of four books we’d read, then discuss “the usefulness or uselessness of plots” to the writer and reader.

He composed the assignment playfully, in letter form, beginning “Dear Gus.” I wrote my paper likewise, from the point of view of a smart but airhead-sounding woman writing letters to her friend about the war ravaging her town between those favoring the short story and those on the side of novelists; her second letter dissected plots, and so on. “Full of life, Suzanne, and that’s all I ever ask of anyone.” He scrawled a fat A.

Looking at his assignments now, I see that is what he asked. They were designed to teach something much more than whatever I thought then he was teaching about writing. He was teaching us to do our own thinking, to find out who we were, what we loved, abhorred, what set off our tripwires, what tripped up our hearts.

To the the rest, - and you should you should - click here.

(Photo of Vonnegut is by Loree Rackstraw.)

*

The Morning Reading: "All the cameras have left for another war"

2012-01-11T05:42:00.000-08:00

The End and the Beginning
by Wisława Szymborska
Translated By Joanna Trzeciak

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

*

The Morning Reading: "the dancing pilgrimage of water"

2012-01-09T05:26:00.000-08:00

Sojourns in the Parallel World
– Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension--though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal--then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we've been, when we're caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
–but we have changed, a little.

*

The Morning Reading: "Well, so that is that"

2012-01-07T09:05:00.000-08:00

from "Christmas Oratorio"
by W.S. Auden

Well, so that is that.
Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes -
Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week -
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully -
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

*

The Morning Reading: "this floating world"

2012-01-04T05:39:00.000-08:00

Year’s end
by Matsuo Basho

Year’s end,
all corners
of this floating world, swept.

*

(English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto)

The Morning Reading: "Ring out false pride in place and blood"

2012-01-01T05:55:00.000-08:00

Ring Out, Wild Bells - Alfred Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

*

The Morning Reading: "In a California no one will ever see again"

2011-12-28T05:50:00.000-08:00

Winter Stars
by Larry Levis

My father once broke a man’s hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Rubén Vásquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held
The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first
Two fingers, so it could slash
Horizontally, & with surprising grace,
Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand,
And, for a moment, the light held still
On those vines. When it was over,
My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always,
Lay alone in the dark, listening to music.
He never mentioned it.

I never understood how anyone could risk his life,
Then listen to Vivaldi.

Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night,
And stare through the wet branches of an oak
In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars
Again. A thin haze of them, shining
And persisting.

It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them.
In California, that light was closer.
In a California no one will ever see again,
My father is beginning to die. Something
Inside him is slowly taking back
Every word it every gave him.
Now, if we try to talk, I watch my father
Search for a lost syllable as if it might
Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now,
The word for it, he is ashamed . . .
If you can think of the mind as a place continually
Visited, a whole city placed behind
The eyes, & shining, I can imagine, now, its end—
As when the lights go off, one by one,
In a hotel at night, until at last
All of the travelers will be asleep, or until
Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind
Of sleep; & while the woman behind the desk
Is applying more lacquer to her nails,
You can almost believe that the elevator,
As it ascends, must open upon starlight.

I stand out on the street, & do not go in.
That was our agreement, at my birth.

And for years I believed
That what went unsaid between us became empty,
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.

I got it all wrong.
I wound up believing in words the way a scientist
Believes in carbon, after death.

Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although
It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind,
The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again—
Which may be all that’s left of you & me.

When I left home at seventeen, I left for good.

That pale haze of stars goes on & on,
Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape
On a black sky. It means everything
It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to reconcile
Even a father, even a son.

*

The Morning Reading: "Yet it was all one sea"

2011-12-26T05:32:00.000-08:00

The Gulf of California
by Anita Endrezze

There are two memories of tides:
one for the deep blackness that split
away from the mother sea
and one for sea that found itself
in the daybreaks of rivers.
Yet it was all one sea
tracked by comets and the Elegant Tern,
seals in speckled pod-shaped skins,
and whales, opening their small eyes
when the hands of people drew fish
out of the salt.

Geologists tell us that the sea split
millions of years ago
before the Yoemem, Yoremem,
Kunkaak, O-Otam
curled their tongues around the names
of themselves and raised the conch shell
to their lips, so that the sound of nature
became human, too:

kalifornia vaawe

Then the sea was measured
and divided into leagues.
The Spanish ships called it dangerous
because the sea tore in two ways,
tide and rivers,
so they contained it in maps
written on dead animal skins
with ink made from dried octopus blood

Mar de la Kalifornia
Golfo de California

Then it was named the Vermilion Sea
when the red-shelled crabs clicked in the waters.
It was the Sea of Cortés
because it’s the right of the Conqueror
to claim the world in his name.

It’s his right to name hunger after himself
and to take away rivers
and children
and to give back the bare bones
of life
in the Queen’s name.

What can you say about men
who name the mountains “mother”
madre
when the worst curse they can shout
defiles their mother
in the act of creation?

Now we call the Gulf of California
polluted
with the pesticides of fields
and the wastes of factories.
And the voices of the fin-backed whale,
sardines, sea-kelp, anemone,
and turtle are quieter,
so that we have less memory
of the way it was
and less hope
for the way it will be.

In the winter I eat strawberries
from Mexico
and oranges, sectioned and split
apart
on my north continental plate.
I don’t know much about my relatives
picking the fields near Bacum, Torim.
I don’t know much about the spiny sea urchin,
except that it knows more than I
about the sea, the sea that names itself
unnameable
movable horizon.

*

The Morning Reading: "The angels were certain."

2011-12-25T05:42:00.000-08:00

A Christmas Poem
By Robert Bly

Christmas is a place, like Jackson Hole, where we all
agree
To meet once a year. It has water, and grass for
horses;
All the fur traders can come in. We visited the place
As children, but we never heard the good stories.

Those stories only get told in the big tents, late
At night, when a trapper who has been caught
In his own trap, held down in icy water, talks; and a
man
With a ponytail and a limp comes in from the edge of
the fire.

As children, we knew there was more to it -
Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve
Wasn't explained, nor why we were so often
Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,

Why so much was lost. Those men and women
Who had died in wars started by others,
Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas
tree
Trembled just before we opened the presents?

There was something about angels. Angels we
Have heard on high Sweetly singing o'er
The plain. The angels were certain. But we could not
Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.

*

The Morning Reading: "the whole galaxy is cartwheeling in silence through the night"

2011-12-24T05:45:00.000-08:00

Going to Bed
by George Bilgere

I check the locks on the front door
and the side door,
make sure the windows are closed
and the heat dialed down.
I switch off the computer,
turn off the living room lights.

I let in the cats.

Reverently, I unplug the Christmas tree,
leaving Christ and the little animals
in the dark.

The last thing I do
is step out to the back yard
for a quick look at the Milky Way.

The stars are halogen-blue.
The constellations, whose names
I have long since forgotten,
look down anonymously,
and the whole galaxy
is cartwheeling in silence through the night.

Everything seems to be ok.

*

The Morning Reading: "But this land grows the oldest living things"

2011-12-23T05:09:00.000-08:00

California Winter
~Karl Shapiro

It is winter in California, and outside
Is like the interior of a florist shop:
A chilled and moisture-laden crop
Of pink camellias lines the path; and what
Rare roses for a banquet or a bride,
So multitudinous that they seem a glut!

A line of snails crosses the golf-green lawn
From the rosebushes to the ivy bed;
An arsenic compound is distributed
For them. The gardener will rake up the shells
And leave in a corner of the patio
The little mound of empty shells, like skulls.

By noon the fog is burnt off by the sun
And the world's immensest sky opens a page
For the exercise of a future age;
Now jet planes draw straight lines, parabolas,
And x's, which the wind, before they're done,
Erases leisurely or pulls to fuzz.

It is winter in the valley of the vine.
The vineyards crucified on stakes suggest
War cemeteries, but the fruit is pressed,
The redwood vats are brimming in the shed,
And on the sidings stand tank cars of wine,
For which bright juice a billion grapes have bled.

And skiers from the snow line driving home
Descend through almond orchards, olive farms.
Fig tree and palm tree - everything that warms
The imagination of the wintertime.
If the walls were older one would think of Rome:
If the land were stonier one would think of Spain.

But this land grows the oldest living things,
Trees that were young when Pharoahs ruled the world,
Trees whose new leaves are only just unfurled.
Beautiful they are not; they oppress the heart
With gigantism and with immortal wings;
And yet one feels the sumptuousness of this dirt.

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.

*

The Morning Reading: "Instead of leader we had louder"

2011-12-22T05:18:00.000-08:00

The Darker Sooner
by Catherine Wing

Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover, never. And over this river
broke the winter’s black weather.

*

The Morning Reading: "But where do we go from here?"

2011-12-20T05:20:00.000-08:00

The Three Kings
by Muriel Spark

Where do we go from here?
We left our country,
Bore gifts,
Followed a star.
We were questioned.
We answered.
We reached our objective.
We enjoyed the trip.
Then we came back by a different way.
And now the people are demonstrating in the streets.
They say they don't need the Kings any more.
They did very well in our absence.
Everything was all right without us.
They are out on the streets with placards:
Wise Men? What's wise about them?
There are plenty of Wise Men,
And who needs them? -and so on.

Perhaps they will be better off without us,
But where do we go from here?

*

The Morning Reading: "The storm puts its lips to the house"

2011-12-18T05:08:00.000-08:00

A Winter Night
by Tomas Transtromer
translated by Robert Bly

The storm puts its lips to the house
and blows to make a sound.
I sleep restlessly, turn over, with closed
eyes read the book of the storm.

But the child's eyes grow huge in the dark
and the storm whimpers for the child.
Both love to see the swinging lamp.
Both are halfway toward speech.

Storms have childlike hands and wings.
The caravan bolts off toward Lapland
and the house senses the constellation of nails
holding its wall together.

The night is quiet above our floor
(where all the died-away footsteps
are lying like sunken leaves in a pond)
but outside the night is wild!

A more serious storm is moving over us all.
It puts its lips to our soul
and blows to make a sound. We're afraid
the storm will blow everything inside us away.

*

(with thanks to the beauty we love)

*
(untitled woodcut by Issac Friedlander)

*

The Morning Reading:"Blow, blow, thou winter wind"

2011-12-16T07:59:00.000-08:00

Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind
by William Shakespeare

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly...

from "As You Like It"

*

The Morning Reading: "the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold"

2011-12-11T09:06:00.001-08:00

Winter Trees
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

*

(image: Ansel Adams)

*

The Morning Reading: "that each heart changes, faced with a single awe"

2011-12-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

Mighty Forms
By Brenda Hillman

The earth had wanted us all to itself.
The mountains wanted us back for themselves.
The numbered valleys of serpentine wanted us;
that’s why it happened as it did, the split
as if one slow gear turned beneath us. . .
Then the Tuesday shoppers paused in the street
and the tube that held the trout-colored train
and the cords of action from triangular buildings
and the terraced gardens that held camelias
shook and shook, each flower a single thought.

Mothers and children took cover under tables.
I called out to her who was my life.
From under the table—I hid under the table
that held the begonia with the fiery stem,
the stem that had been trying to root, that paused
in its effort—I called to the child who was my life.
And understood, in the endless instant
before she answered, how Pharaoh’s army, seeing
the ground break open, seeing the first fringed
horses fall into the gap, made their vows,
that each heart changes, faced with a single awe
and in that moment a promise is written out.

However we remember California later
the earth we loved will know the truth:
that it wanted us back for itself
with our mighty forms and our specific longings,
wanted them to be air and fire but they wouldn’t;
the kestrel circled over a pine, which lasted,
the towhee who loved freedom, gathering seed
during the shaking lasted, the painting released
by the wall, the mark and hook we placed
on the wall, and the nail, and the memory
of driving the nail in, these also lasted—

*

(image by Tom Killion)

*

The Morning Reading: "California Dreaming"

2011-12-04T10:05:00.000-08:00

from "California Dreaming"
by Charles Wright

Piece by small piece the world falls away from us like spores
From a milkweed pod,
and everything we have known,
And everyone we have known,
Is taken away by the wind to forgetfulness,
Somebody always humming,
California dreaming . . .

*

The Morning Reading: "Obliged to the fulfillment of a natural process"

2011-11-30T05:13:00.000-08:00

Many in the Darkness
by Thomas MacGrath

November 1941

We sat in the park, but there was a war between us,
A dead moon over us and all around us
The shy and secret whisperings as of the tiny
Woods animals which in the high forest gather
Wind-fallen goods before the frost comes.

We praised as lucky all whose sure existence
(As of the careless moon, the dutiless squirrels)
Is not responsible for human history—
Feeling how our happiness, how hope must mount
Machine guns which other men yet have the firing of,
How liberty is seen in the form of a fighter plane
Millions look up asking, Is it ours?

Our despair was temporary but not less painful.
Over us the moon was quiet about its business,
Pouring its constant light upon the naked beaches.
The squirrels built up their small defenses
Obliged to the fulfillment of a natural process.
Their leaf-lined cell, the brilliance of the moon,
The winter cannot touch and no touch tarnish.

*

The Morning Reading: "The Animals are Leaving"

2011-11-28T05:02:00.000-08:00

The Animals are Leaving
by Charles Harper Webb

One by one, like guests at a late party
They shake our hands and step into the dark:
Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling.

One by one, like sheep counted to close our eyes,
They leap the fence and disappear into the woods:
Atlas bear; Passenger pigeon; North Island laughing owl;
Great auk; Dodo; Eastern wapiti; Badlands bighorn sheep.

One by one, like grade school friends,
They move away and fade out of memory:
Portuguese ibex; Blue buck; Auroch; Oregon bison;
Spanish imperial eagle; Japanese wolf; Hawksbill
Sea turtle; Cape lion; Heath hen; Raiatea thrush.

One by one, like children at a fire drill, they march outside,
And keep marching, though teachers cry, “Come back!”
Waved albatross; White-bearded spider monkey;
Pygmy chimpanzee; Australian night parrot;
Turquoise parakeet; Indian cheetah; Korean tiger;
Eastern harbor seal ; Ceylon elephant ; Great Indian rhinoceros.

One by one, like actors in a play that ran for years
And wowed the world, they link their hands and bow
Before the curtain falls.

*

(image: John James Audubon: Passenger Pigeon)

*

The Morning Reading: "My freehold of Thanksgiving"

2011-11-27T06:22:00.000-08:00

from "My Triumph"
BY JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

The autumn-time has come;
On woods that dream of bloom,
And over purpling vines,
The low sun fainter shines.

The aster-flower is failing,
The hazel’s gold is paling;
Yet overhead more near
The eternal stars appear!

...

I feel the earth move sunward,
I join the great march onward,
And take, by faith, while living,
My freehold of thanksgiving.

*

(image by the great Sue Coe. Click to enlarge.)
*

The Morning Reading: "a little sound of thanks"

2011-11-26T05:26:00.000-08:00

Around Us
by Marvin Bell

We need some pines to assuage the darkness
when it blankets the mind,
we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly
as a plane's wing, and a worn bed of
needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind,
and a blur or two of a wild thing
that sees and is not seen. We need these things
between appointments, after work,
and, if we keep them, then someone someday,
lying down after a walk
and supper, with the fire hole wet down,
the whole night sky set at a particular
time, without numbers or hours, will cause
a little sound of thanks--a zipper or a snap--
to close round the moment and the thought
of whatever good we did.

*

The Morning Reading: "we are saying thank you"

2011-11-24T06:05:00.000-08:00

Thanks
by W. S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is.

*

The Morning Reading: "We've sold our harps and bought ourselves machines"

2011-11-22T05:24:00.000-08:00

After Psalm 137
by Anne Porter

We're still in Babylon but
We do not weep
Why should we weep?
We have forgotten
How to weep

We've sold our harps
And bought ourselves machines
That do our singing for us
And who remembers now
The songs we sang in Zion?

We have got used to exile
We hardly notice
Our captivity
For some of us
There are such comforts here
Such luxuries

Even a guard
To keep the beggars
From annoying us

Jerusalem
We have forgotten you.

*

The Morning Reading: "Every day there's something old to feel sorry about"

2011-11-20T05:41:00.000-08:00

Regret
by Lawrence Raab

Every day there's something old
to feel sorry about—
what I should have done and didn't,
or what I did, and kept on doing.

I want to believe
everyone's forgotten by now.
Then I picture them thinking back.

And those who've died
and earned the wisdom death allows
just shake their heads and sigh.
"Very funny," my father would say

after my sister and I played
some cruel little joke on him.
"Ha, ha," he'd add,
to let us know he got the point.

We want to forget
until we start to forget.
We want the past to change,
and we want it back.

"Enough is enough,"
my father used to say
to tell us it was over.

*

The Morning Reading: "the day came fat with an apple in its mouth"

2011-11-17T05:13:00.000-08:00

Animals
~Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

*

The Morning Reading: "November has come to the forest"

2011-11-15T05:57:00.000-08:00

Falling Leaves and Early Snow
-Kenneth Rexroth

In the years to come they will say,
“They fell like the leaves
In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.”
November has come to the forest,
To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen.
The year fades with the white frost
On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows,
Where the deer tracks were black in the morning.
Ice forms in the shadows;
Disheveled maples hang over the water;
Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.
Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.
The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,
The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,
The olive, velvety alder leaves,
The scarlet dogwood leaves,
Most poignant of all.

In the afternoon thin blades of cloud
Move over the mountains;
The storm clouds follow them;
Fine rain falls without wind.
The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.
When the rain pauses the clouds
Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls.
In the evening the wind changes;
Snow falls in the sunset.
We stand in the snowy twilight
And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.
Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,
Glimmering with floating snow.
An owl cries in the sifting darkness.
The moon has a sheen like a glacier.

*

image: Tom Killion: Big Arroyo
*

The Morning Reading: "There is always more than you know"

2011-11-12T05:01:00.000-08:00

Dancing
by Margaret Atwood

It was my father taught my mother
how to dance.
I never knew that.
I thought it was the other way.
Ballroom was their style,
a graceful twirling,
curved arms and fancy footwork,
a green-eyed radio.

There is always more than you know.
There are always boxes
put away in the cellar,
worn shoes and cherished pictures,
notes you find later,
sheet music you can't play.

A woman came on Wednesdays
with tapes of waltzes.
She tried to make him shuffle
around the floor with her.
She said it would be good for him.
He didn't want to.

*

Happy Birthday Kurt Vonnegut

2011-11-11T11:28:00.000-08:00

*

(with thanks to the beauty we love)

*

The Morning Reading: "nothing left to hunt"

2011-11-10T05:19:00.000-08:00

In Chandler Country
by Dana Gioia

California night. The Devil's wind,
the Santa Ana, blows in from the east,
raging through the canyon like a drunk
screaming in a bar.

The air tastes like
a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?
The weather's fine as long as you don't breathe.
Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,
lights turned out, windows shut against the storm,
and count your blessings.

Another sleepless night,
when every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches
like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,
when every ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,
and quiet women in the kitchen run
their fingers on the edges of a knife
and eye their husbands' necks. I wish them luck.

Tonight it seems that if I took the coins
out of my pocket and tossed them in the air
they'd stay a moment glistening like a net
slowly falling through dark water.

I remember
the headlights of the cars parked on the beach,
the narrow beams dissolving on the dark
surface of the lake, voices arguing
about the forms, the crackling radio,
the sheeted body lying on the sand,
the trawling net still damp beside it. No,
she wasn't beautiful – but at that age
when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty –
"Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?"

Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door
catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.
Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm,
packs of coyotes come down from the hills
where there is nothing left to hunt.

*

Submit! Inlandia

2011-11-08T05:43:00.000-08:00

Inlandia: A Literary Journey is currently seeking fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and images by writers and artists whose work is in some way grounded in Inland Southern California; works that will give readers around the globe a sense of the region and its people. Above all else we want fresh, compelling writing.

Inlandia: A Literary Journey is the online literary journal for the Inlandia Institute. Inlandia provides free public readings, professional development seminars, creative writing workshops, and more, throughout the Inland Empire.

For full guidelines and to access the online submissions form please visit our website at www.inlandiajournal.org.

*

The Morning Reading: "Nothing much changes in the glittering rooms of the heart"

2011-11-07T05:49:00.000-08:00

15
by Charles Wright

You still love the ones you loved
back when you loved them—books.
Records, and people.
Nothing much changes in the glittering rooms of the heart,
Only the dark spaces half-reclaimed.
And then not much,
An image, a line. sometimes a song.

Car doors slam, and slam again, next door.
Snow nibbles away at the edges of the dark ground.
The sudden memory of fur coats,
erotic and pungent,
On college girls in the backseats of cars, at Christmas,
Bourgeois Americana, the middle 1950s,
Appalachia downtown.

And where were we going? Nowhere.
Someone's house, the club, a movie?
See the pyramids along the Nile,
WKPT, I'm itching like a man on a fizzy tree.
It didn't matter.
Martin Karant was spinning them out,
and the fur was so soft.

*

The Morning Reading: "The old fineness in him hangs on"

2011-11-05T05:56:00.000-07:00

The Pear
- Jane Hirshfield

November. One pear
sways on the tree past leaves, past reason.
In the nursing home, my friend has fallen.
Chased, he said, from the freckled woods
by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais.
Delusion too, it seems, can be well read.
He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread.
The old fineness in him hangs on
for dear life. “My mind now?
A small ship under the wake of a large.
They force you to walk on your heels here,
the angles matter. Four or five degrees,
and you’re lost.” Life is dear to him yet,
though he believes it his own fault he grieves,
his own fault his old friends have turned against him
like crows against an injured of their kind.
There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy.
Descend, descend,
some voice must urge, inside the pear stem.
The argument goes on, he cannot outrun it.
Dawnlight to dawnlight, I look: it is still there.

*

The Morning Reading: "Outside the house the wind is howling"

2011-11-03T05:49:00.000-07:00

In November
- Lisel Mueller

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

*
(image: Robert Patierno - Autumn Wind)

*

The Morning Reading: "but there's more water in the creek than I’ve ever seen"

2011-11-02T08:04:00.000-07:00

Dear Bob,
-Dean Young

The mountain thinks it’s the same
without you but it’s wrong. Maybe
the same stars whisking themselves
further off, the darker the brighter,
same chamomile crushed underfoot
but the little, wiry dog we loved
has preceded us into paradise, not
that I expect to join her even though
my own crappy heart’s worse, running’s
out but I may be finally learning how
to sit in a chair. I still don’t know
what to call the good morning bird
although whatever word’d be no truer
than manzanita. I think namelessness
has a crush on me, on how clean
I keep my room, the usual stunned
ruckus of wake up. But it’s a different
moon, different woman on the hotel balcony
yet the same kinda scary, vacant stare,
caryatid foreseeing what? Before
turning back to the customary, immaculate
vacation squalor inside. The cash machine
still says “enter to exit” but there’s
more water in the creek than I’ve ever seen,
the brighter the darker, in that first dream
there was none.

This poem appears in Poetry (November 2011)

(photo of Squaw Valley meadow by Brett Hall Jones.)

*

The Morning Reading: "The spirit-world around this world of sense"

2011-10-31T07:45:00.000-07:00

Haunted Houses
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses.Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

We meet them at the door-way, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.

We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
Owners and occupants of earlier dates
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
And hold in mortmain still their old estates.

The spirit-world around this world of sense
Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapours dense
A vital breath of more ethereal air.

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar
Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star
An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
Throws o'er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
Into the realm of mystery and night,--

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O'er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

(images: photos of details of the fireplace mural of Peter Carr)

The Morning Reading: "All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine"

2011-10-30T10:58:00.000-07:00

Not Mine
by Czeslaw Milosz
translated by Robert Hass

All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine
And to know such pretending is disgraceful.
But what can I do? Suppose I suddenly screamed
And started to prophesy. No one would hear me.
Their screens and microphones are not for that.
Others like me wander the streets
And talk to themselves. Sleep on benches in parks,
Or on pavements in alleys. For there aren't enough prisons
To lock up all the poor. I smile and keep quiet.
They won't get me now.
To feast with the chosen — that I do well.

*
Photo by Thai Phan-Quang from Occupy Oakland.

(thanks once again to the beauty we love)

*

The Morning Reading: "cross the threshold"

2011-10-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being. Any new metaphor is a telescope, a canoe in rapids, an MRI machine. And like that MRI machine, sometimes its looking is accompanied by an awful banging. To write can be frightening as well as magnetic. You don't know what will happen when you throw open your windows and doors.

Why write? You might as well ask a fish, why swim, ask an apple tree, why make apples? The eye wants to look, the ear wants to hear, the heart wants to feel more than it thought it could bear...

The writer, when she or he cannot write, is a person outside the gates of her own being. Not long ago, I stood like that for months, disbarred from myself. Then, one sentence arrived; another. And I? I was a woman in love. For that also is what writing is. Every sentence that comes for a writer when actually writing—however imperfect, however inadequate—every sentence is a love poem to this world and to our good luck at being here, alive, in it.

~ Jane Hirshfield

(with thanks to the beauty we love)

*

The Morning Reading: "Come October"

2011-10-23T05:56:00.000-07:00

The Fatalist: Come October, it's the lake not the border
by Lyn Hejinian

Come October, it’s the lake not the border
that has been redrawn. Thinking
about the event afterwards, I realize how remarkably well-prepared
the girls are. There don’t seem to be any slouches
among them. Please tell them I say hello and that we’ll need 14
for the green salad and 14 for the apple tarts between
with some rapid washing in clear water I remember as play
and planning in childhood, preparing until the very last moment
for a gripping narrative that was itself perpetually given over
to improvisations and asymmetrical collaborations that could run
for days. That makes another 14. It was ”the word“ or “the world” in 1981
when we undertook to talk about the phrase
“once in a while” once in a while
noting the vagueness then named “a while” and how “once” the phrase
recurs and therefore means more than once
the “while” is defined. We too are in “a while”
and when “once” next occurs, if the basic design suits
you, we will need a bit of modestly biographical contextualization
for November. I’m going to put some thought to something
implausibly contemporary which perhaps isn’t wise
since between then and now no new coincidences have been noted
just one large color photograph of bespangled cowgirls
herding heavy bulls up the avenue that opens this week carefully
wearing baby blue boots to take out the garbage
but it never rained. At the end of the month, Halloween should be clear.

*

The Morning Reading: "love to the harvest moon"

2011-10-21T05:33:00.000-07:00

Theme in Yellow
by Carl Sandburg

I SPOT the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

*

Submit! The Rattling Wall

2011-10-19T07:41:00.000-07:00

The Rattling Wall, a new literary journal based in Los Angeles, publishes short fiction travel essays and poetry and is funded by PEN Center USA.

The deadline is upcoming for their next issue - submissions are accepted until November 1, 2011.

For more information on submissions, check out their website.

*

This Saturday: Beside the City of the Angels: A Long Beach Poetry Festival

2011-10-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

This weekend, nearby Long Beach celebrates poetry with the first ever Beside the City of Angels: A Long Beach Poetry Festival.

Donna Hilbert describes the initial inspiration in a post for the Belmont Shores/Naples Patch:

Standing around after a poetry reading in early spring with my good friends, the exceptional poets, Anna Badua, Clint Margrave, Kevin Lee, Paul Tayyar and Tamara Madison, all of us chatting about how much we love poetry and how much we love Long Beach, when one of us said, “We should have a Long Beach poetry festival.” It was like being a kid again when someone says, “Let’s put on a show!”

Only this time there would be no costumes or puppets and we would have bona fide talent. Thus, Beside the City of Angels: A Long Beach Poetry Festival was born. This is a free event, open to the public. In addition to the readings, there will be the opportunity to buy books and have them signed by the authors as well as rub elbows with editors and publishers.

The impressive line-up includes some of my former teachers and fellow students from my undergraduate days at CSULB:

Erika Ayon
Amanda J. Bradley
John Brantingham
David Caddy
Jeff Epley
Dorothea Grossman (with trombonist Michael Vlatkovich)
Raymond P. Hammond
David Hernandez
Steve Kowit
Cassandra Love
Rick Lupert
Bill Mohr
Joan Jobe Smith
Clifton Snider
G. Murray Thomas
Mehnaz Turner
Fred Voss
Charles Harper Webb
Grace Zabriskie
Rafael Zepeda

For more information, visit their website.

And go!

*

The Morning Reading: "you violate the past"

2011-10-11T07:31:00.000-07:00

To My Daughter in a Red Coat
by Anne Stevenson

Late October. It is afternoon.
My daughter and I walk through the leaf-strewn
Corridors of the park
In the light and the dark
Of the elms' thin arches.

Around us brown leaves fall and spread.
Small winds stir the minor dead.
Dust powders the air.
Those shrivelled women stare.
At us from their cold benches.

Child, your mittens tug your sleeves.
They lick your drumming feet, the leaves.
You come so fast, so fast.
You violate the past,
My daughter, as your coat dances.

*

The Morning Reading: "What happened to him when he was a boy?"

2011-10-08T05:33:00.000-07:00

Game
by Maxine Kumin

Before he died
Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
gunned down in Sarajevo
to jump-start World War I,
bragged he had shot three
thousand stags and a miscellany
of foxes, geese, wolves, and boars
driven toward him by beaters,
stout men he ordered to flush
creatures from their cover
into his sights, a tradition
the British aristocracy
carried on, further aped
by rich Americans
from Teddy R. to Ernest H.,
something Supreme
Court Justice Antonin
Scalia, pudgy son of Sicilian
immigrants, indulged in
when, years later, he had
scores of farm-raised birds
beaten from their cages and scared
up for him to shoot down
which brought him an inner joy.
What happened
to him when he was a boy?

*

The Morning Reading: "Remember the moments when we were together"

2011-10-06T05:44:00.000-07:00

Try to praise the mutilated world
by Adam Zagajewski

Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

*

The Morning Reading: "I'd add not a thing to his pain"

2011-10-05T05:38:00.000-07:00

Revenge
by Taha Muhammad Ali

At times ... I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I'd rest at last
and if I were ready -
I would take my revenge!

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who'd put
his right hand over
the heart's place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they'd set -
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

Likewise ... I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn't bear his absence
and who his presents thrilled.

Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school...
asking about him
and sending him regards.

But if he turned
out to be on his own -
cut off like a branch from a tree -
without mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I'd add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness -
nor the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I'd be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street - as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

*

Twigs

And, so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people's hearts.

*

Ali died on October 2, at age 80.

*

The Morning Reading: "be for me, like the rain, the getting out"

2011-10-04T08:28:00.001-07:00

The Rain
by Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

*

woodcut: Suzanne Caporael
Seeing Things: Rain, 1990

*

photo: by Allen Ginsberg
*

The Morning Reading: "Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft"

2011-10-03T05:18:00.000-07:00

To Brooklyn Bridge
by Hart Crane

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

*

(via Ron Silliman)

Today: Mission Viejo Readers Festival

2011-10-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

via the OC Weekly:

Mission Viejo Readers Festival
Norman P. Murray Community Center
By Andrew Tonkovich

Famously among the country’s safest cities, beautiful Mission Viejo seems also to be one of its most literary. Ipso facto? Perhaps besides encouraging smarts and empathy, friends, reading fights crime! This year’s third annual Readers’ Festival features ten authors in one day—celebrity to the young adult genre, mystery and more—in three rooms, with booksellers and local food vendors.

Speaking of food, heartbreakingly lovely actress Linda Evans unveils her memoir Recipes for Life. Also, legendary activist priest and Homeboy Industries founder Father Gregory Boyle discusses (modestly) his success at bringing hope to gangbangers and good food to supermarkets via his own award-winning memoir, Tattoos on the Heart. And bestselling OC novelist Andrew Winer reads from his newest, about a mother, her “heart burdened by the weight of love,” in a meditation on art, fate and history. Big-hearted authors, big-hearted event. Share the love!

Price: Free

Norman P. Murray Community and Senior Center
24932 Veterans Way
Mission Viejo, CA 92692-2740

*

For more information, check out their website.

*

The Morning Reading: Anne Beattie: "Best of luck with your future."

2011-09-26T08:04:00.000-07:00

from the Paris Review archives:

excerpt:

INTERVIEWER: How do you normally start your stories—with a phrase, a character?

BEATTIE: It usually starts with an image. “Hoodie in Xanadu,” for instance, was written about someone who was renting directly across the street from me in Key West last year. He would come out in his hoodie and look left and right, standing right in the middle of the street. Eventually I figured out that he was buying drugs. That wasn’t of interest, but what he might be as a character interested me. It’s usually something that has caught my attention like that—as opposed to my suddenly discovering some potential in, say, that palm tree over there.

INTERVIEWER: Does a story ever start with a piece of dialogue?

BEATTIE: Often hearing the characters talk clarifies something to me about who they are. That information doesn’t always have to be in the final version. A couple of times dialogue has brought a short story to an immediate stop. It was true in “The Burning House.” When the husband expressed his innermost thoughts at the end, I thought, Well, you just lost that story, Beattie. Then after a long time of sitting there defeated, staring stupidly at the typing paper, I gave him one final line that was exactly the point at which I had to end. I so much didn’t want to hear one more word from him that I almost didn’t play fair and let him end the story.

INTERVIEWER: That speech is remarkable:

“Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding yourself a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake—you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of the May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”

He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

BEATTIE: “All your life you’ve surrounded yourself with men”—that was told to me point blank, by a friend who really meant to enlighten me. And I was enlightened. “Superman is part of the consciousness,” he also said. Roger Angell fine-tuned the analogies.

People commend me on that speech all the time. Women come up to me at readings and they have that speech cut out and it’s in their wallets where they used to have pictures of their husbands and children. I find myself saying, “But don’t you think that husband was rather disturbed?” I’ve had people write to me, “I read your story and suddenly it all came clear to me and I’ve left my husband and I’m in a downtown Cheyenne, Wyoming, motel and what do I do next?”

INTERVIEWER: What do you write back?

BEATTIE:“Best of luck with your future.”

*

To rest the interview in its entirety, click here.

*

Yesterday: SRO for Sandra Cisneros

2011-09-25T12:58:00.000-07:00

Sandra Cisneros today at Martinez Bookstore

2011-09-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

Today, in Santa Ana from 3-5 pm, the writer Sandra Cisneros will be reading from her work at the Martinez Bookstore.

The bookstore is located at 216 N. Broadway in Santa Ana. Parking is available nearby. The bookstore telephone number is (714) 973-7900.

Today's event is free – but it's very likely to be very crowded. Come be part of the crowd.

*

The Morning Reading: "They are dervishes because they are dying"

2011-09-21T05:33:00.000-07:00

Equinox
by Elizabeth Alexander

Now is the time of year when bees are wild
and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped
loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants
in the bright, late-September out-of-doors.
I have found their dried husks in my clothes.

They are dervishes because they are dying,
one last sting, a warm place to squeeze
a drop of venom or of honey.
After the stroke we thought would be her last
my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped

a nurse across the face. Then she stood up,
walked outside, and lay down in the snow.
Two years later there is no other way
to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light
as an empty hive, and she is breathing.

*

The Morning Reading: "it is time to face another way"

2011-09-20T05:18:00.000-07:00

The Summer Ends
by Wendell Berry

IV

The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way. Our theme
Reversed, we harvest the last row
To store against the cold, undo
The garden that will be undone.
We grieve under the weakened sun
To see all earth's green fountains dried,
And fallen all the works of light.
You do not speak, and I regret
This downfall of the good we sought
As though the fault were mine. I bring
The plow to turn the shattering
Leaves and bent stems into the dark,
From which they may return. At work,
I see you leaving our bright land,
The last cut flowers in your hand.

*

(image by Tom Killion)
*

The Morning Reading: "the elegy blowing through it"

2011-09-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

The History of Mothers of Sons
By Lisa Furmanski

All sons sleep next to mothers, then alone, then with others
Eventually, all our sons bare molars, incisors
Meanwhile, mothers are wingless things in a room of stairs
A gymnasium of bars and ropes, small arms hauling self over self

Mothers hum nonsense, driving here
and there (Here! There!) in hollow steeds, mothers reflecting
how faint reflections shiver over the road
All the deafening musts along the way

Mothers favor the moon—hook-hung and mirroring the sun—
there, in a berry bramble, calm as a stone

This is enough to wrench our hand out of his
and simply devour him, though he exceeds even the tallest grass

Every mother recalls a lullaby, and the elegy blowing through it

*

Submit! Zocalo Public Square: Real and Imagined Landscapes

2011-09-14T05:52:00.000-07:00

via Poets and Writers:

Poetry Contest Seeks Real and Imagined Landscapes

Zócalo Public Square, a Los Angeles–based web forum for ideas and literature, began accepting entries last week for a poetry contest sprung from Zócalo's mission to further understanding of citizenship and community. The "living magazine," which combines online journalism with lectures and other real-world events, will consider poems that evoke a sense of place for a one-thousand-dollar prize and publication on the Zócalo website.

“'Place' may be interpreted by the poet as a place of historical, cultural, political or personal importance," say the guidelines on the contest page. "It may be a literal, imaginary or metaphorical landscape. We are looking for one poem that offers our readers a fresh, original, and meaningful take on the topic."

Poets may send up to three poems via e-mail by November 5. There is no entry fee.

The winner will be announced next March in conjunction with the recipient of Zócalo's second annual book prize, a five-thousand-dollar award recognizing a work on the topic of community published in the United States. (There is no submission process for the book award.)

For more information, visit their website by clicking here.

*

The Morning Reading: "a grafted pulse"

2011-09-10T05:18:00.000-07:00

"Full Flight"
by Bill Hickok

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building.
It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers
is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin
a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud
inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire
and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right
resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers
came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it
and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape
it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind
of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight
variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water
and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth
of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America.
People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee,
sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern
of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations
and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest
we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone,
I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top
fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos
and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling
I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders
are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word,
a motion the brain requires for which there is
no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped,
when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause
when we could have been perfectly American,
could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million
bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge
into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact
and more convincing for its precision, an expression
of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt.
We've lived in the sky again for some years and today
on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies
stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles
about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children
turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even
with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves
I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem
in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches
are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know—
switches of humor, of faith—but the men are musical
in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi
and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh
of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory
of the world, and just as the idea of embrace
moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed
as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces
we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.

*

Submit! Tin House: Weird Science

2011-09-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

Tin House Spring 2012 theme: WEIRD SCIENCE

Improbable, far-fetched, real? Today's science headlines read like futuristic tales. From nanobots and neutrinos to architeuthis, the real is often stranger than the most speculative sci-fi. In that vein, we are looking for fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that goes beyond the headlines into current, past, and future scientific explanations of "reality." We are open to speculative fiction, if there are humans involved.

Suggested deadline: October 1, 2011.

Guidelines
Please submit only one story or essay (ten-thousand-word limit), or up to five poems at a time. Multiple submissions will be returned unread.

We consider each submission for all upcoming issues regardless of theme, however, please feel free to make a note in your cover letter if you wish to be considered for a particular theme.

We shall do our best to respond within three months, however, in some cases this period may be longer. If you have not received a response from us within ninety days, we will be happy to respond to your e-mail inquiries. We do ask that you please wait until you hear back from us before submitting new work for consideration. Tin House does accept simultaneous submissions. In the event that the work is accepted for publication elsewhere, please do us the courtesy of informing us promptly. Only previously unpublished works will be considered for publication.

Our reading period is September 1-May 31; submissions received outside this reading period will be returned unread. Cover letters should include a word count and indicate whether the submission is fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Also, please note whether or not you would like your manuscript returned. Manuscripts transmitted via fax or e-mail will not be accepted for consideration. Only those processed through our online submission manager or sent by regular mail will be considered for publication.

Submissions can be mailed to Tin House, PO Box 10500, Portland, OR 97210. Please enclose an SASE (include an IRC with international submissions), or we cannot guarantee a response to or the return of your work.

For more information (including how to submit electronically), check out their website.

*

The Morning Reading: "What work is"

2011-09-05T05:15:00.000-07:00

What Work Is
by Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

*

The Morning Reading: "It was the only life I had"

2011-09-03T05:30:00.000-07:00

Three Songs at the End of Summer
by Jane Kenyon

A second crop of hay lies cut
and turned. Five gleaming crows
search and peck between the rows.
They make a low, companionable squawk,
and like midwives and undertakers
possess a weird authority.

Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.

Across the lake the campers have learned
to water ski. They have, or they haven't.
Sounds of the instructor's megaphone
suffuse the hazy air. "Relax! Relax!"

Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,
fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine.
The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod
brighten the margins of the woods.

Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts;
water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.

*

The cicada's dry monotony breaks
over me. The days are bright
and free, bright and free.

Then why did I cry today
for an hour, with my whole
body, the way babies cry?

*

A white, indifferent morning sky,
and a crow, hectoring from its nest
high in the hemlock, a nest as big
as a laundry basket...
In my childhood
I stood under a dripping oak,
while autumnal fog eddied around my feet,
waiting for the school bus
with a dread that took my breath away.

The damp dirt road gave off
this same complex organic scent.

I had the new books—words, numbers,
and operations with numbers I did not
comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.

Spruce, inadequate, and alien
I stood at the side of the road.
It was the only life I had.

*

Submit! John Steinbeck Short Story Award

2011-09-01T05:03:00.000-07:00

John Steinbeck Short Story Award

Deadline: November 1, 2010
Entry Fee: $15
Web site: www.reedmag.org
E-mail address: reed@email.sjsu.edu

A prize of $1,000 and publication in Reed Magazine is given annually for a short story.

James Kelman will judge. Using the online submission system, submit a story with a $15 entry fee, which includes a copy of the prize issue, by November 1. Visit the Web site for complete guidelines.

Reed Magazine, English Department, San Jose State University, 1 Washington Square, San Jose, CA 95192-0090.

For more information, click here.

The Morning Reading: "Not light but language shocks us out of sleep"

2011-08-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

The End of Summer
by Rachel Hadas

Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn—
an early warning of the end of summer.
August is fading fast, and by September
the little purple flowers will all be gone.

Season, project, and vacation done.
One more year in everybody’s life.
Add a notch to the old hunting knife
Time keeps testing with a horny thumb.

Over the summer months hung an unspoken
aura of urgency. In late July
galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky
like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken,

we looked at one another in the dark,
then at the milky magical debris
arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality.
There were two ways to live: get on with work,

redeem the time, ignore the imminence
of cataclysm; or else take it slow,
be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow
we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence
(she paces through her days in massive innocence,
or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so).

In fact, not being cows, we have no choice.
Summer or winter, country, city, we
are prisoners from the start and automatically,
hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice.

Not light but language shocks us out of sleep
ideas of doom transformed to meteors
we translate back to portents of the wars
looming above the nervous watch we keep.

*

The Morning Reading: "stars staking a constellation"

2011-08-29T04:44:00.000-07:00

from the Atlantic:

"Don’t Write What You Know:
Why fiction’s narrative and emotional integrity will always transcend the literal truth"
by Bret Anthony Johnston

excerpt:

Every Wednesday, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don’t start a story with an alarm clock going off. Don’t end a story with the whole shebang having been a suicide note. Don’t use flashy dialogue tags like intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don’t Write What You Know.

The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful lot. In recent workshops, my students have included Iraq War veterans, professional athletes, a minister, a circus clown, a woman with a pet miniature elephant, and gobs of certified geniuses. They are endlessly interesting people, their lives brimming with uniquely compelling experiences, and too often they believe those experiences are what equip them to be writers. Encouraging them not to write what they know sounds as wrongheaded as a football coach telling a quarterback with a bazooka of a right arm to ride the bench. For them, the advice is confusing and heartbreaking, maybe even insulting. For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters....

...Instead of thinking of my experiences as structures I wanted to erect in fiction, I started conceiving of them as the scaffolding that would be torn down once the work was complete. I took small details from my life to evoke a place and the people who inhabit it, but those details served to illuminate my imagination. Before, I’d forced my fiction to conform to the contours of my life; now I sought out any and every point where a plot could be rerouted away from what I’d known. The shift was seismic. My confidence waned, but my curiosity sprawled. I was writing fiction, to paraphrase William Trevor, not to express myself, but to escape myself. When I recall those stories now, the flashes of autobiography remind me of stars staking a constellation. Individually, the stars are unimportant; only when they map shapes in the darkness, shapes born of imagination, do we understand their light...

*
To read the rest, click here.

The Morning Reading: "His prose was like a call to duty"

2011-08-27T05:10:00.000-07:00

from the Paris Review Interviews:

Jonathan Franzen, The Art of Fiction No. 207
Interviewed by Stephen J. Burn

excerpt:

INTERVIEWER

When did you first come across DeLillo?

FRANZEN

I remember a Christmas visit to my wife’s family during which she gave me Players. I remember reading it on the train back up to Boston and having one of the purest aesthetic responses I’ve ever had. I’d finally found somebody who was putting on the page the apocalyptic, postindustrial urban aesthetic that I’d been looking for in film and photographs and had found expressed in music, particularly by Talking Heads. And here was somebody who was getting it on the page and writing like a dream. His prose was like a call to duty: You must write better. Here, see, it can be done. I find it remarkable that people don’t talk more about Players. In certain ways, DeLillo never wrote better.

INTERVIEWER

What did you find so attractive about him?

FRANZEN

It came as no surprise when I learned, later, that he sometimes composed books with one paragraph on each page, starting a new page after only a few sentences. His paragraphs really do have a stand-alone quality. It was through reading him that I came to see pages as collections of individual sentences. For a young writer, in particular, the terrors of the paragraph become more manageable when you see it as a system of sentences. I also started to see all the junk DNA that had cluttered my paragraphs before then, and that I’d been unaware of.

*

To read the interview in its entirety - and to peruse their archives for others, click here.

*

The Morning Reading: "Our hair turns white"

2011-08-25T04:55:00.000-07:00

Ripening
by Wendell Berry

The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!

*****

discovered on the beauty we love

Submit! The Rattling Wall

2011-08-23T05:49:00.000-07:00

Last spring I posted a call from submissions for The Rattling Wall, a new literary journal based in Los Angeles which publishes short fiction travel essays and poetry and is funded by PEN Center USA.

Recently a reader of this blog informed me that his work had been accepted for their next issue.

So, here's to that success story - and here's to The Rattling Wall and their new issue - for which they are accepting submissions until November 1, 2011.

For more information on submissions, check out their website - and also their video below.

*

The Morning Reading: "Some day mountains will be named after you"

2011-08-22T05:13:00.000-07:00

Climbing Milestone Mountain, August 22, 1937

By Kenneth Rexroth

For a month now, wandering over the Sierras,
A poem had been gathering in my mind,
Details of significance and rhythm,
The way poems do, but still lacking a focus.
Last night I remembered the date and it all
Began to grow together and take on purpose.
We sat up late while Deneb moved over the zenith
And I told Marie all about Boston, how it looked
That last terrible week, how hundreds stood weeping
Impotent in the streets that last midnight.
I told her how those hours changed the lives of thousands,
How America was forever a different place
Afterwards for many.
In the morning
We swam in the cold transparent lake, the blue
Damsel flies on all the reeds like millions
Of narrow metallic flowers, and I thought
Of you behind the grille in Dedham, Vanzetti,
Saying, “Who would ever have thought we would make this history?”
Crossing the brilliant mile-square meadow
Illuminated with asters and cyclamen,
The pollen of the lodgepole pines drifting
With the shifting wind over it and the blue
And sulphur butterflies drifting with the wind,
I saw you in the sour prison light, saying,
“Goodbye comrade.”
In the basin under the crest
Where the pines end and the Sierra primrose begins,
A party of lawyers was shooting at a whiskey bottle.
The bottle stayed on its rock, nobody could hit it.
Looking back over the peaks and canyons from the last lake,
The pattern of human beings seemed simpler
Than the diagonals of water and stone.
Climbing the chute, up the melting snow and broken rock,
I remembered what you said about Sacco,
How it slipped your mind and you demanded it be read into the record.
Traversing below the ragged arête,
One cheek pressed against the rock
The wind slapping the other,
I saw you both marching in an army
You with the red and black flag, Sacco with the rattlesnake banner.
I kicked steps up the last snow bank and came
To the indescribably blue and fragrant
Polemonium and the dead sky and the sterile
Crystalline granite and final monolith of the summit.
These are the things that will last a long time, Vanzetti,
I am glad that once on your day I have stood among them.
Some day mountains will be named after you and Sacco.
They will be here and your name with them,
“When these days are but a dim remembering of the time
When man was wolf to man.”
I think men will be remembering you a long time
Standing on the mountains
Many men, a long time, comrade.

*
Image: Milestone Mountain from a Lake below Mt. Ericsson by Tom Killion

Submit! Hayden's Ferry Review

2011-08-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

from their website:

HFR's 50th Issue: Send Us Your Artifact Submissions

(Aug. 1, 2011) - To celebrate Hayden's Ferry Review's 25th anniversary, we've got a special theme in the works. We'd like to receive work—fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, translations, art, mixed-media—that addresses the theme of "artifacts," as described (somewhat vaguely, on purpose!) here.

Art is, by its nature, a record. Literature, photographs, paintings, music: all these seek to catalogue the world just as they seek to elevate and transform it. A piece of art is also then, by its nature, an artifact: an object with unique meaning both within its context and apart from it. For HFR's 50th issue, we're interested in investigating how fragments and relics from our history help to shape our current state of being. What happens when you wrest an object from its homeland (in time, place, state of mind)? Why do we trust remnants of the past as distinctively truthful, and how do we inevitably misunderstand them? Send us writing and art that engages with the theme of "artifact" in whatever way you see fit. Consider the fact that writing itself—the writing, for instance, in HFR's 49 past issues—becomes a slightly different object upon publication and perusal. Consider that work banned in one country develops a new set of meaning in other places. Consider how artifacts shape the identities of people, nations, cultures. Consider the lives of fraudulent artifacts, objects that create invented histories and narratives. And hey, consider something that we haven't. Tell us all about ourselves: we trust you.

To submit, go to our Submishmash page here. Choose the genre you're submitting under, and mention that you're submitting in response to our "artifact" call in the comments section. The deadline for this call is January 1, 2012. We look forward to reading your work!

The Morning Reading: "I cannot remember things I once read"

2011-08-15T05:26:00.000-07:00

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
by Gary Snyder

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

*

The Morning Reading: "Here is the star cage."

2011-08-13T05:07:00.000-07:00

Perseid Shower
by Gary Short

Meteors break
through the late-summer night,

white blossoms scattering, furiously.
They don’t make a noise,

at least none
that we can hear.

They disappear in all directions
signifying desire

and its difficulty.
There. The half-moon floats

thin and translucent
as an insect’s wing. We say the moon is

half-full,
even as it wanes.

So much longing. . .
to witness the unfolding

across distance. How we must look
to anyone watching.

Here is the star cage.
Here the still life with black clock.

*

The Morning Reading: "News of revolts in the squares "

2011-08-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Hour Until We See You
by Brenda Hillman

When we part, even for an hour,
you become the standing on the avenue
baffled one, under neon,
holding that huge
red book about the capital— ;

what will you be in the next hour,
— bundled to walk
through creamy coins from streetlamps
on sidewalks to your car, past
candles reflected in windows, while
mineral sirens fade in the don’t
return,— driving home past
pre-spring plum blossom riot
moments of your thought...

Those trees rush to rust leaves,
each a time-hinge with great energy—
they can’t bear inexactitude.
News of revolts in the squares —there—
& here, the envious have gone to cafés
to speak in order to leave things out—
Love, literature is in flames,
it was meant to be specific—;
you have driven past these rooms
ten thousand times to make your report;
make your report;
never forget how you felt—

*

The Morning Reading: "all you want"

2011-08-05T05:25:00.000-07:00

Teenage Interplanetary Vixens Run Wild on Bikini Beach
by Allison Joseph

A wash of surf guitar rolls
over cheapo credits, beach music
for three gone chicks to frug to
as they descend from their
styrofoam spaceships in stellar
bikinis, gyrating their hips
as they land on the swinginest
beach in Southern California,
hairsprayed beehives intact
after lengthy space travel.
Will our gals find romance
though adrift from their planet,
the skin they reveal through
chintzy bikinis green, clammy
with make-up? Whoever said
production values could stand
in true love's way? Whoever
said talent makes a movie?
Our trusty aliens sally forth
to find the humans of their dreams,
guys who spend all day on surfboards
rigged up before cardboard backdrops,
hoping the camera records
only from their waists up,
who can't choose between
greasy pompadours and Beatle cuts,
so they end up looking
like dead raccoons have settled in
to die atop their heads.
Our heroines must lure them
with frantic dancing so frenzied
that stretches and splotches
of melted green monster make-up
are visible to any viewer.
If you can make it past
the badly dubbed dialogue,
if you can match each alien
to her name, her guy, then
you might care if this plot's
resolved, might wonder whether
our green space babes will find a way
to fix their faulty ship.
But you don't care.
All you want to see
are poorly painted women
running amok in a sand-filled
studio set, all you want to hear
are wild guitars screeching sex
to the girl who sits beside you
in the theater's dark, her breath
quick as a go-go dancer's,
her hand the hand you clutch,
palm sweaty in yours.

*

The Morning Reading: "the big sky river rushes overhead"

2011-08-03T05:39:00.000-07:00

Jet
by Tony Hoagland

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

*

The Morning Reading: "The trees are bored with being green"

2011-08-01T05:14:00.000-07:00

August
by John Updike

The sprinkler twirls.
The summer wanes.
The pavement wears
Popsicle stains.

The playground grass
Is worn to dust.
The weary swings
Creak, creak with rust.

The trees are bored
With being green.
Some people leave
The local scene

And go to seaside
Bungalows
And take off nearly
All their clothes.

*

The Morning Reading: "dismiss whatever insults your own soul"

2011-07-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

from the preface of Leaves of Grass

~ Walt Whitman

This is what you shall do;
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches,
give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words
but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes
and in every motion and joint of your body.

*

(I love the spirit of this - and was reminded of it recently by the beauty we love.)

The Morning Reading: "even as children we already knew"

2011-07-27T05:18:00.000-07:00

From a Bridge
by David St. John

I saw my mother standing there below me
On the narrow bank just looking out over the river

Looking at something just beyond the taut middle rope
Of the braided swirling currents

Then she looked up quite suddenly to the far bank
Where the densely twined limbs of the cypress

Twisted violently toward the storm-struck sky
There are some things we know before we know

Also some things we wish we would not ever know
Even if as children we already knew & so

Standing above her on that bridge that shuddered
Each time the river ripped at its wooden pilings

I knew I could never even fate willing ever
Get to her in time

*

(from the July/August issue of Poetry)

The Morning Reading: "proud flesh"

2011-07-25T05:54:00.000-07:00

For What Binds Us
-Jane Hirschfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

The Morning Reading: "his slow green way"

2011-07-23T05:37:00.000-07:00

The Caterpillar
by Miller Williams

Today on the lip of a bowl in the backyard
we watched a caterpillar caught in the circle
of his larvel assumptions
my daughter counted
27 times he went around
before rolling back and laughing
I'm a caterpillar, look
she left him
measuring out his slow green way to some place
there must have been a picture of inside him
After supper
coming from putting the car up
we stopped to look
figured he crossed the yard
once every hour
and left him
when we went to bed
wrinkling no closer to my landlord's leaves
than when he somehow fell into his private circle
Later I followed
barefeet and doorclicks of my daughter
to the yard the bowl
a milkwhite moonlight eye
in the black grass
it died
I said honey they don't live very long
In bed again
re-covered and re-kissed
she locked her arms and mumbling love to mine
until yawning she slipped
into the deep bone-bottomed dish of sleep
Stumbling drunk around the rim
I hold
the words she said to me across the dark
I think he thought he was
going in a straight line.

*

Miller Williams and his daughter, singer-songwriter, Lucinda Williams.

*

Submit! Ploughshares: special nonfiction issue

2011-07-22T04:32:00.000-07:00

NewPages reports that:

Ploughshares is looking for nonfiction submissions for a special nonfiction issue to be published in Fall 2012.

The issue will be guest-edited by Patricia Hampl.

Ploughshares takes online and mailed submissions.

*

The Morning Reading: "the land is bright with wildflowers"

2011-07-20T05:20:00.000-07:00

McClures Beach
by Sidney Hall Jr.

Here at the end of the world,
or so it seems to a traveller
in this country,

where the sun buffs the sea silver
in the late afternoon,
and water drips from the high clay banks,

having come as far as it can
from the upland meadows
where tule elk graze,

even here at this end of the world
where two turkey vultures in the sand
empty the white rib cage of a dead seal,

even here where the water is dripping
into the sand, poppies blossom,
yellow and orange,

and the land is bright with wildflowers,
as if to surprise each new visitor
who comes to the end of the world.

*

(Pt. Reyes from McClures Beach - Tom Killion)
*

Submit! Spillway: special issue: "Crossing Borders"

2011-07-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

SPILLWAY wants poems, July and August only, for a themed issue: “Crossing Borders.”

Send us poems of place: yes, poems of immigration but also poems of those borders between people, neighborhoods, jobs, life stages, etc. Surprise us.

Editor: Susan Terris.

Tebot Bach Publisher: Mifanwy Kaiser.

Submit 3–5 poems.

Website: http://tebotbach.org.

E-mail submission only: spillway2@tebotbach.org.

*

The Morning Reading: "Things bloom up there."

2011-07-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

On Squaw Peak
by Robert Hass

I don't even know which sadness
it was came up
in me when we were walking down the road to Shirley Lake,
the sun gleaming in snowpatches,
the sky so blue it seemed the light's dove
of some pentecost of blue,
the mimulus, yellow, delicate of petal,
and the pale yellow cinquefoil trembling in the damp
air above the creek,--
and fields of lupine,
the blue blaze of lupine, a swath of paintbrush
sheening it, and so much of it, long meadows
of it gathered out of the mountain air and spilling
down ridge toward the lake it almost looked like
in the wind. I think I must have thought
the usual things: that the flowering season
in these high mountain meadows is so brief, that
the feeling, something like hilarity, of sudden
pleasure when you first come across some tough little plant
you knew you'd see comes because it seems -- I mean
by "it" the larkspur of penstemon curling
arching the reach of its sexual being
up out of a little crack in granite -- to say
that human hunger has a niche up here in the light-cathedral
of the dazzled air. I wanted to tell you
that when the ghost-child died, the three-month dreamer
she and I would never know, I kept feeling that
the heaven it went to was like the inside of a store window
on a rainy day from which you watch the blurred forms
passing in the street. Or to tell you, more terrible,
that when she and I walked off the restlessness
of our misery afterward in the Coast Range hills,
we saw come out of the thicket shyly
a pure white doe. I wanted to tell you I knew
it was a freak of beauty like the law of averages
that killed our child and made us know, as you had said,
that things between lovers, even of longest standing,
can be botched in their bodies, though their wills don't fail.
Still later, on the beach, we watched the waves.
No two the same size. No two in the same arch
of rising up and pouring. But it is the same law.
You shell a pea, there are three plump seeds and one
that's shriveled. You shell a bushelful and you begin
to feel the rhythm of the waves at Limantour,
glittering, jagged, that last bright October afternoon.
It killed something in me, I thought, or froze it,
to have to see where beauty comes from. I imagined
for a long time that the baby, since
it would have liked to smell our clothes to know
what a mother and father would have been,
hovered sometime in our closet and I half expected
to see it there, half-fish spirit, form of tenderness,
a little dead dreamer with open eyes. That was
private sorrow. I tried not to hate my life,
to fear the frame of things. I knew what two people
couldn't say
on a cold November morning in the fog --
you remember the feel of Berkeley winter mornings --
what they couldn't say to each other
was the white deer not seen. It meant to me
that beauty and terror were intertwined so powerfully
and went so deep that any kind of love
can fail. I didn't say it. I think the mountain startled
my small grief. Maybe there wasn't time.
We may have been sprinting to catch the tram
because we had to teach poetry
in that valley two thousand feet below us.
You were running -- Steven's mother, Michael's lover,
mother and lover, grieving, of a girl
about to leave for school and die to you a little
(or die into you, or simply turn away)--
and you ran like a gazelle,
in purple underpants, royal purple,
and I laughed out loud. It was the abundance
the world gives, the more-than-you-bargained-for
surprise of it, waves breaking,
the sudden fragrance of the mimulus at creekside
sharpened by the summer dust.
Things bloom up there. They are
for their season alive in the bright vanishings
of air we ran through.

*

(photo by Tracy Hall)

The Morning Reading: "No one could make us come down."

2011-07-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

The Summer We Didn't Die
by William Stafford

That year, that summer, that vacation
we played out there in the cottonwood—
we were young; we had to be brave.
Far out on those limbs above air,

We played out there in the cottonwood
Above grown-ups who shouted, "Come down!"
Far out on those limbs above air
We were brave in that summer that year.
No one could make us come down.

"You’ll be killed!" We were scared, but we held on.
That year, that summer, that vacation,
no one could make us come down.
We were young. We had to be brave.

*

The Morning Reading: "It is hard being a person."

2011-07-13T05:51:00.000-07:00

The Morning Reading: "each night was a Walt Whitman of holidays"

2011-07-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

American Summer
by Edward Hirsch

Each day was a time clock that scarcely moved,
a slow fist punching us in, punching us out,
electric heat smoldering in the purple air,

but each night was a towering white fly ball
to center field—“a can of corn”—coming down
through stark glittering above the diamond.

Each day was a pair of heavy canvas gloves
hoisting garbage cans into an omnivorous mouth
that crept through thoroughfares and alleys,

but each night was the feeling of a bat
coming alive in your hands, it was lining
the first good pitch for a sharp single.

That summer I learned to steal second base
by getting the jump on right-handed pitchers
and then sliding head-first into the bag.

I learned to drive my father’s stick shift
And to park with my girlfriend at the beach,
Our headlights beaming and running low.

I was a sixteen-year-old in the suburbs
and each day was another lesson in working,
a class in becoming invisible to others.

But each night was a Walt Whitman of holidays,
the clarity of a whistle at five p.m.,
the freedom of walking out into the open air.

*

Submit! Creative Nonfiction: True Crime

2011-07-07T05:27:00.000-07:00

CONTEST: TRUE CRIME
postmark deadline: September 30, 2011

For an upcoming issue, Creative Nonfiction is seeking new essays about true crimes—detailed reports of premeditation, follow-through and aftermath, whether gleaned from police blotters or the news, passed down as small-town legend or family lore, or committed in cold blood.

We want true stories of petty theft, identity theft, embezzlement or first-degree murder; of jaywalking, selling (or maybe buying) weed or assault; of crimes and punishments and unsolved mysteries. Think "The Devil in the White City" (Larson), "In Cold Blood" (Capote) and "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" (Malcolm); or "Half a Life" (Strauss), "Lucky" (Sebold) and "The Night of the Gun" (Carr). If it’s against the law and someone—maybe even you!—did it anyway, we want to know all about it.

We’re looking for well-written prose, rich with detail and a distinctive voice. Essays can be serious, humorous or somewhere in between. Creative Nonfiction editors will award $1000 for Best Essay.

Guidelines: Essays must be unpublished, 4,000 words maximum, postmarked by September 30, 2011, and clearly marked “True Crime” on both the essay and the outside of the envelope. There is a $20 reading fee (or send a reading fee of $25 to include a 4-issue CNF subscription–U.S. submitters only); multiple entries are welcome ($20/essay) as are entries from outside the U.S. (though due to shipping costs, the subscription deal is not valid). Please send manuscript, accompanied by a cover letter with complete contact information including the title of the essay, word count, SASE and payment to:

Creative Nonfiction
Attn: True Crime
5501 Walnut Street, Suite 202
Pittsburgh, PA 15232

For mroe details, check out their website.

*

The Morning Reading: "We mean to be the people we meant to be"

2011-07-05T05:57:00.000-07:00

Of History and Hope
by Miller Williams

We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.

But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row—
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.

Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become—
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet—
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

*

(Faith Ringgold- Flag Story Quilt)

The Morning Reading: "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"

2011-07-04T05:13:00.000-07:00

The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

*

(Robert Rauschenberg, Statue of Liberty)

The Morning Reading: "each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you"

2011-07-03T05:51:00.000-07:00

America
by Tony Hoagland

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

*

(Jaspar Johns - Three Flags)

The Morning Reading: "Everything that's been done to him, he will now do"

2011-07-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb
by Sharon Olds

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn't
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him. Everything
that's been done to him, he will now do.
Everything that's been placed in him
will come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

*