Please help the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival

At the end of the year, pre-tax season, my inbox is filled with capital requests from presses, nonprofits, and organizations whom I don't remember signing up for. These are hard economic times. And so, I repost a worthwhile request from friends at the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival. Please support the festival and/or the publication of the Forget the Words anthology.

Subject: Support for the poetry festival at year's end!

A short note at the end of 2010 to ask you to consider a contribution to the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival, the next to be held this coming March 10-13.

Enpuku-ji/Centre Zen de la Main organizes the festival and, as a registered charity, is able to issue tax receipts for Canadian gifts.

You can contribute via CanadaHelps by following this link, choosing "Donate Now", and choosing the "Zen Poetry Festival Fund". CanadaHelps will provide your downloadable 2010 tax receipt.

You can also contribute to the publishing of our festival collection, forget the words!, and receive copies of our past collection, broadsides, tickets to the upcoming festival and more, by following this link to our on-line Indiegogo page.

For our American and European friends of the festival, we would like to send you either a lovely broadside or a book of poems of past or future invitees for a contribution of $100 or more.

Thank you for taking a moment to read this on the last day of the year. Really, any day is a fine one for supporting this unusual niche festival and we appreciate the support we have received in the past and that which will come.

Warmest wishes for the new year,
Myokyo

It's the last day of 2010 and the last day of vacation. I resolve to reclaim this space in 2011 and say more, or to say less more, etc.

After 7 years of booking my own readings, I've decided to reach out to a few speaker bureaus and a solidify a partnership in the new year so that I no longer negotiate my own reading contracts. Promoting a book is time-consuming work - I'd just as soon spend that energy on writing, cooking, or doing nothing. Think less about the writing business and get on with life.

I did not get any writing done over winter break. There were good reasons for it. I read Norman Schaefer's new book and wished that I could write poems like Norman. Today, Lisa Gill's Dark Enough arrived. I revisited several White Pine titles to help a friend develop a container garden display for the Northwest Garden and Flower show and had the delightful occasion to contemplate the microcosm and space of a container garden as a field of elegance and refinement, akin to a bonsai tree or Japanese rock garden. I hope to build some poetry gardens in the future - branch out into living environments, much like a hero, Robert Irwin.

Planning two trips in the spring to Boulder - to attend two 1-week residencies for the Naropa authentic leadership program. Short trip in early February to DC for AWP, and to Seattle in March for 8 days. My criteria for a vacation used to be the proximity to a beach. But there is nothing I'd like better than to chill in the PNW. And technically there are beaches.

This time of year, I get reflective and often compile elaborate lists of goals and resolutions for the impending year. This year, on the heels of a visit with my parents who visited last week - my thoughts turn to the following: that a purpose in life might be framed around removing suffering and making life better for others.

That said, there are unwritten lists and the childhood BF in Austin and I unhatch plans that our husbands would likely balk at or question if they knew the nature of such plannings. Perhaps we will resume our blog swapping.

Out of the tiger year and into the rabbit. The year of my birth totem. May 2011 and the rabbit bring balance, renewed energy, and deep connection to our best and brightest being.

New Poem

meow meow kitty kitty death rattle

we don’t know
why you died –
that morning

Kort saw you
steal into the yard
meow meow kitty cat –

death rattle buzz
of flies swarming
around your corpse

when we came home
that day gaseous spasms
jerking a life

force, I stood over
your body watching
nerves refire, remembering

how sound is the last
sense to go
before passing

After All This Time

I had to take a break from this blog to reconsider what I wanted this space to be. I will continue to make posts on a limited basis. Thank you for dropping by.

Some recent news:

Adamantine reviewed by Stephen Sohn for the Lantern Review.

Rigoberto Gonzalez engages with Adamantine on the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass here.

Poet and blogger Djelloul Marbrook offers his reading of Adamantine here.

Trailer for ADAMANTINE

Coming soon:

after helping the giant
spider back outside, I lock
the kitchen door

discards

(after viewing Deborah Luster’s unpublished tintypes from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana)

a question of sentence:
events marked w/
occasioned images
happy holiday
happy Mardi Gras
happy Easter
happy Samhain

a question of locution:
OG Bump
Lone Outlaw
Thug Life
In Memory of Mom
a question of surface:
tattoo-scrawled torso
torched surfaces
dodging & burn
seared cicatrix

a question of constitution:
St. Andrew’s cross modeled
after hoe & rake, art historical
sigils to civil wars
Christ’s Last Supper
his final meal

a question of value:
dull blacks, faded whites
flattened tiers of grey

This blog was silent for a few months and now that I am out of Texas, I feel that I can put the last few months behind me. In March, I received a death threat email at my inbox at the Wittliff Collections. Though it was sent anonymously, the content of the message aligned itself with our confederate neighbors in our apartment complex, with the stars and bars on their balcony next door. The message was sent to make sure that we would move out at the end of May when our lease term expired.

We were out of town traveling when the threat came in and returned to Texas to file a police report. An investigation ensued which tracked the offending email down to a public computer terminal at UCLA, in the School of Management. The trail went cold there and our local dick, "Poorboy," announced to me via voice mail message that he was closing the case. The details of the email revealed too much to be just a random threat - it knew too much about the specifics of the situation and created a tenuous living situation where I wasn't sure if I was being cyberstalked or followed to work. I took down this blog temporarily and started thinking much more carefully about my own personal privacy and safety.

So when what appears to be a fantastic job opportunity came open in Arkansas and we had a chance to leave Texas - we accepted. I am spending June and July writing and traveling and start work in August.

Adamantine is moving along with production. Ran into some trouble with the art work I'd originally chosen for the cover - a Keith Carter image which he graciously agreed to have reproduced for the book. Unfortunately, Christian Wiman published a Copper Canyon book of essays in 2008 which used the same image, which I discovered while walking around the AWP bookfair in Denver last month. So I hunted around for alternatives and discovered the work of Chinese-Canadian photographer Elaine Ling and felt myself drawn to her photograph of the Atacama stone - the same subject that Carter photographed, but with a different spin. The presence of the graffiti on the desert sculpture makes the piece feel less ancient, more modern... which brings an interesting and perhaps more accurate framing of the poems within the book.

unused condom
litters LBJ - aborted
assault or un-"lucky"?

thinking about how
over generations an artery
changes its name

from Nathan Forrest to MLK

"coming Fall 09"
Concho Commons Spring 2010:
still an overgrown lot

choose your battles

the half hour it took
the peasant-skirted protestor
to chalk a hundred library
stairs with missives
re: atrocities in Gaza,
this morning's major
clean-up task for minimum-
wage earners, sweepers
from groundskeeping
& maintenance

Earth day in Seattle:
make a papier-mache piñata
in the shape of a globe

use recycled copies of
The Stranger
& club it to a pulp

Earth day: TxState –
Ride your bike to work & get
a free bottle of water

"some people have difficulty getting numb"

off of SSRIs for one week
Dr. Dean tells me
how the oral health
of a mother affects
the weight of an unborn
child, why treating
an abscessed tooth
can lead to complications
when novocaine must be
traded for lidocaine

"sometimes it is not enough"

to take the metal probe
to recognize what hurts

Some notes on vulgarity:

"In Victorian fiction, to show excessive distaste for vulgarity is to betray a fatal character flaw: a concern for style and class at the expense of ethics.... to value social distinction over moral discrimination- is to prove onself not just a bad reader but effectively illiterate, father beneath the community of fellow-feeling that every Victorian novel summons into being than a monkey is beneath a margrave." - Joseph Litvak in "Vulgarity, Stupidity, and Worldliness in Middlemarch"

"The quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity lest we die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence" - Middlemarch

after she announces
the break-up, I think twice about
her third dislocated shoulder

country mouse: neck deep
a cow eating its way through
five-foot tall haystack

New educational Isabella Rossellini videos at the Sundance Channel!

White Pine Press has updated their 2010 titles to now reflect Adamantine. Preorder the book here!

The Chinati Foundation is looking for a new director, as is the Dallas Contemporary. And Jeff Koons is curating at the New Museum.

This weekend, I am travelling to Little Rock.

Where can I see these Gonzales-Torres billboards?

Photo essay on our old 'hood in Seattle. But where is India Palace and Whole Foods and SIOM and Dream Clinic?

Filmmaker Jonathan Yi is making a mini-doc about Asian American stories. This is my submission for the casting call:

I'm teaching a class for Gemini Ink in late July. Here's the course description:

The Exquisite Eye: A Poetry Workshop, Saturday, July 24, 2010, 9 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Poet and assistant curator at the Wittliff Collections Shin Yu Pai will lead a workshop on ekphrastic poetry. We will look at various poetic models that deploy a range of strategies including descriptive illustration, the poem as interpretive occasion, and ekphrasis as a critical meditation, through reading poets with ties to the Southwest including Carol Moldaw, Arthur Sze, and Miriam Sagan. Participants will sharpen their visual thinking skills and experiment with writing poems based on photographic images from the Wittliff Collections’ Southwestern and Mexican Photography Collection. In keeping with the theme of environment and landscape for the Summer Festival, this workshop will contemplate images of place, drawing inspiration from images composed by children from Mineral de Pozos, Guanajuato, to anonymous photographers documenting la zone de tolerancia in the red light districts of Mexican bordertowns to Graciela Iturbide’s images of quotidian life in Juchitan, Oaxaca. (Maximum enrollment: 10-12)

Flood Song by Sherwin Bitsui. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2009. 69 pp. $15.00 paperback.

In Korean culture, the solo pansori singer vocally and physically transforms herself through performing every character in a story, in addition to vocally mirroring the sounds of nature within the span of a single recital. A traditional performance lasts between three to eight hours, and requires not only musical talent, but intense focus and fortitude. “In pansori, the voice that narrates is more than a message-bearer…Pansori thrives much less on improvisation or new composition than on the confirmation of its past. Still, its performance is a reconstruction of not merely the past, but the continuing past. In the process of unquestioning emulation emerges an individual voice expressive simultaneously of the tradition and of the performer’s own interpretive aesthetics.”*

It is through this metaphor of the pansori tradition, that a reader might consider Sherwin Bitsui’s Flood Song. Composed of muscular lines that “stomp across the living room ceiling” refusing to be silenced, Bitsui’s contemporary lyric is one that is characterized by visceral language, urgent rhythms, and the abstraction of archetypal and cultural images and symbols that “speak a double helix.”

Major themes in Bitsui’s dazzling second collection include the loss of language, agency, and cultural symbols, that explore “some piece of the idea of now/ before it becomes was.” (26) Throughout this extended poem, the author calls attention to linguistic erosion:

What happened when gunfire blew into their speech
and left one language hanging by a nail
at the entrance of mouths (21)

A song falls flat when it cannot be understood, “what what what – is how the song chimed in wilderness” (13) and “how na ho kos feels/ under the weight of all that loss.” (11) Colonial intervention into the native language creates an impenetrable wall where “…there is no tongue to smooth away the hairline fracture between us and them.” (24 )

An unwavering consciousness of indigenous subjectivity runs throughout Flood Song: “… we have become bodies for the first time/… our language stabs the fork with the spoon.” (29) "Bodies pile up on the lawns, “…landlocked inside the naming of: / them, those, not like us…” (51), while others rest on surgical tables “waiting for the surgeons to carve us back into shape.” (66)

The making of subjects is addressed elsewhere in Flood Song through the recurring imagery of televisions, commercials, and media that manufacture images and depict native subjects.

A whip’s leather scent flairs camera shutters
open to the softened teeth of masked dancers…
pressing a handful of chipped house paint
against their smeared faces
you say
‘We need this color of wings blood’ (42)

Elsewhere, a figure is “photographed on a horse facing west,” and later a spectator watches “a boat fizzle and flake.” Viewed through the static of television, the mediated image becomes another kind of manmade conundrum akin to “locked doors” and a paper crane unfolding “into a square cage.”

Flood Song is filled with stunning visual images that loop and repeat throughout the poem. The recurring image of eyes and seeing are significant – the poet “breathe[s] through my eyelids/glimpsing the thawing of our flat world.” (64) Keyholes and doors evoke the imagery of Jean Cocteau’s surrealist film Le sang d'un poète: While Cocteau’s artist smashes a sculpture with a hammer, here, the poet downs a tree with an axe.

Turning full circle back to the idea of pansori, it takes about ten years for a performer to learn the basic vocal techniques of the form; the singer must develop a complete command of the lyrics, as there are no scores to aid the artist throughout his performance. As a follow-up collection to Shapeshift, Bitsui’s Flood Song demonstrates the mature development of one of our generation’s most gifted and promising poets.

*Park, Chan. “Korean p'ansori Narrative” in Oral Tradition 18(2), 2003, pp. 241-243.

One is walking
one is standing

who is more entitled
to the path

*

To distribute material possessions
is to divide them
to distribute spiritual possessions
is to multiply them

      - Josef Albers

Coming this Fall...

I just finished reading Alex Lemon’s new memoir Happy. The library copy is a bright yellow – evocative of lemons and 1970s happy faces/acid trips. Slightly modified from the mainstream trade edition which splits the cover design into yellow and black color fields, with the title text designed to create a bleeding effect into the black color field.

Lemon’s memoir focuses on the diagnosis, treatment and recovery of a brain malformation which is discovered while the author is a young athlete at a tight-knit mid-Western liberal arts college. Lemon chronicles a hyper-masculine existence of drunken parties, substance abuse, male bonding, locker-room talk, and promiscuity and a substantial amount of the book’s dialogue is comprised of one expletive after another. The author indulges in a fair amount of physical abuse and self-mutilation of his own body, which can be connected in part back to his earlier childhood experiences of incest which is touched upon briefly in a flashback sequence in the book.

While this is a fairly straight-laced vs. experimental prose narrative, Lemon uses a certain amount of poetic liberty and device, which too often interrupts the narrative by refocusing the reader’s attention on strange turns of phrase and quirky metaphors. The primary device deployed is the use of nouns transformed into verbs:

“I shotgun the beer”
“Blood curtains my teeth”
“Knuckling my groin”
“the party cords around the basement”
“I pyramid the rocks”
“I smoke up and mummy myself”
“she slowly napkins her mouth”
“I want to puddle into the floor”
“shipping tankers domino the hem of the water”
“anesthesia zippers me up”
“noise carousels above me”
“my lips are peeling again, swollen and strawberried”
“I Zorro the cane”
“I gimp into Snelling”
“brightness porcupining my face”
“siphoning out of our clothes”

Scattered throughout the book, these phrases are inconsistent with the rest of the narrative language, which shifts between high and low vernacular, though extracted and taken out of the whole, are interesting fragments of language.

Lemon also uses unusual metaphors:

“my heart flops up and down like a Ziploc bag of ground beef”
“when the neurologist turns the lights own, it’s a charred jar dropped over me”
“rain splatting the windshield like chum”
“a spray of birds is flapping madly, like puppets hanging from the sky”

The ground meat metaphor doesn’t work for me at all, but the rain likened to chum is evocative of a heavy downpour.

This book was a challenging to stay with and finish out. At times, I found myself disliking the young narrator who post-op, "flicks the scabby crumbs [of his surgical wound] at strangers' food and cups." But juxtaposed with more complex scenes such as the narrator's recollection of the first bed that his mother ever made him "egg foam and a salt of cardboard, raised off of the floor by bricks" and the narrator's discovery of a frozen dead mouse beneath that bed, Lemon begins to create more complexity to his narrator's history and character. Yet the author writes of his fear of being seen as weak (after the surgery) or vulnerable - and while I think this admission and self-disclosure is quite revealing, I'm not sure that as a project, Happy dug beneath the surface of physical suffering. I've been reading Ben Saenz's work a lot lately, another poet, who works within prose writing and think that Saenz more skillfully addresses themes of shame, incest, family violence, and psychological trauma.

Because I love my husband, and my best friend, and realize that whenever we eat out I tend to vote Asian, I've consented to go here for Valentine's Day - which also happens to be Chinese New Year's. Sigh.

Second weekend in a row that Kort and I drove up to Dallas. Yesterday in town for a reading at Paperbacks Plus with Jerry Kelley. I read work written primarily while we lived in Seattle and Jerry read new short prose excerpts from a long short-story that he's been working on based on his experiences of living in the Canadian bush. It was great to see Renee Rossi and old WordSpace friend Martha Heimberg and DMA friends. Karen X has also returned from her exile in Santa Fe and is back to hosting the P+ series. Met poet Peter Gurnis, a thoughtful and observant listener and reader of poems, who commented to me that my poems are "moral." This reminded me of Xi Chuan's comments in China that my poems reflect a certain "value." My hope is that I am not clubbing anyone over the head with this sense of morality or value, but for me the interest in social justice and poetry are inseparable. Peter was the only person in the audience that I didn't already know from my days in Dallas - which is to say that the turnout was pretty thin, but reading for friends is a good audience to try out new material. Kort insists that I stop talking about Turrell's Roden Crater as an extinct volcano, as supposedly according to science, volcanos never truly go extinct. I can't wait to visit the Crater someday - and for that matter the James Turrell Museum in Buenos Aires that is on the grounds of a vineyard...

I spent this morning working with Ben Fountain, who has a new op-ed piece in the NY Times, inventorying the archives of Robert Trammell, the founder of WordSpace. There was a treasure trove of correspondence that included materials from Robert Creeley, Gerald Burns, Jeff Davis,Naomi Shihab Nye, and Susan Smith Nash. Manuscript materials from David Searcy and Gerald Burns, and of course, Trammell himself, who was quite prolific, both as poet and prose writer. Also, a great poster collection that included promo pieces for the New Arts Festival in Dallas that Trammell organized, long before he started up WordSpace and began organizing events through the nonprofit. I never realized what a community organizer and social activist that Trammell was and seeing his programming notes and ideas for conferences and events really gave some wonderful insight into his aesthetic and intellectual values. I learned too that not all of Bob's books were self-published under his Barnburner imprint, but that at least two of his books were published by Salt Lick Press.

I have finished reading Last Night I Sang to the Monster and am now on to reading Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood and He Forgot to Say Goodbye. Saenz's Last Night... reminded me in ways of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces - similar themes, similar scenarios, but oh so different writing. The fact that Saenz is a poet, really comes through in the craft and language of this young adult novel for adults. You will not find unending run-on sentences or vertical pages of text where there is a confusion about who is speaking, and pages of texts that could be trimmed - I am thinking of Frey's work. The teenage protagonist, Zach, finds himself in a detox/rehabilitation facility and has blacked out and forgotten how he got there. Throughout his healing journey, he makes connections to others in his therapy group who model certain behaviors and attitudes which help to push Zach towards working through his wounding. Zach finds himself connecting particularly with an older male father figure (like Frey's friend Leonard) who helps him to both love and allow himself to be loved. The monster is a metaphor for the wounded child inside all of us - in Frey's book it was the green-eyed monster that he could never look in the eye in the mirror. This is so much a better book than Frey's, in that although it is a work of fiction, it deals completely with emotional truth and the process of uncovering and working through one's pain from the perspective of a victimized young person who is trapped by circumstances. Zach is not the overprivileged white protagonist of Frey's pseudo-memoir, but a poor kid who is the son of an alcoholic father and a manic depressive mother and the brother to a rager who murders his parents in cold blood and then commits suicide in front of Zach, leaving him the sole survivor of family dysfunction. The sorts of violence that happen in Saenz's books are real, true-to-life, and severely damaging. I found myself in tears at least 5 times, reading Last Night... and came away feeling that this work was a sort of gift/offering, something that I did not feel after reading Frey's memoir when it first came out.

Went yesterday afternoon to Jack Myers' memorial service in Dallas at SMU. Tony Hoagland, Brian Clements, Ralph Angel, Joe Ahearn, Gillian Connolley, and Mark Cox, all spoke on their profound friendships with Jack and his ability as a master teacher, who had so very clearly had a huge impact on each of their lives. Jack's older brother played a chorus of "Around Midnight" by Thelonious Monk (a song that he and Jack would play together as adolescents) and Jack's eldest son and wife performed an elegiac musical piece with cello and piano. The service itself lasted about an hour and then the group proceeded to the reception where Thea, Jack's widow, had organized several small exhibitions of Jack's interests - things like his favorite foods (lobster and black licorice), manuscripts, books, esoteric interests of study, etc. There was also a station with his ashes enshrined inside a beautiful wooden box that was beside an image of him in his hospital bed. Jack was never a teacher to me, nor a close associate, but someone who gave me a chance to teach at SMU, by letting me take over his class. In truth, I probably had more interactions with his wife Thea over the years, and wanted to go to the memorial to show our support for her.

Though we've been gone from Dallas for three years now, there were a lot of familiar faces, and individuals with whom I left relationships at loose ends. In the end, gatherings like yesterday's remind me of why it's important to move on and how Dallas never felt like the right fit, and probably never will.

We've been getting used to the long and regular road trip from San Marcos to Dallas and come up with conversations to entertain ourselves. We wondered yesterday for instance why no one has invented an air freshener for a car that smells like freshly baked bread. Or why no one has invented a chewing gum that tastes like chocolate chip cookies.

News from my hometown. They've been restoring the Fox since I was in high school.

Currently reading Ben Saenz's Last Night I Sang to the Monster to prepare for interviewing him for the Collections' newsletter.

Happy 39th wedding anniversary to my parents, Tsu-Chiang and Lee-Shieh, aka Paul and Noko.

Finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Kaz Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World.

Gladwell's book focuses on breaking down the myth of the self-made genius, analyzing a variety of case histories/stories where opportunity, privilege, access to resources, and circumstances played a large role in ensuring success and/or genius. He spends a fair amount of time analyzing why Asians are good at math (attributing abilities with math to the linguistic system and the short/compact words which form the basis of numbers in the Chinese language system, which allows even the youngest child learning how to count, to count to a higher figure than his/her Western counterparts). He talks about statistical odds, generational/historical opportunity, time investment, and the ancestral legacies that shape experience. While I didn't love this book, it did give me much to reflect upon, in terms of analyzing the privilege and resources that were available to me, and the sacrifices made by my parents to provide some of those opportunities. I would not be the person that I am, if I had stayed in Riverside at the age of 17. I would not be the person that I am now, if my my mother and I hadn't worked very hard to pay my way to studying abroad in a foreign country during my college years. I would not be the person I am, if my father had never decided to leave Taiwan, when he did. Does my dad's work ethic come from cultivating rice paddies and farming (which he literally did), as Malcolm Gladwell would suggest? And does my own work ethic stem from the transmission of these values? And would I be a very different artist/writer, if I put in 10,000 hours a year into my writing? I don't know, nor is this necessarily a practical or relevant question. We live the lives that we live and balance multiple priorities and commitments.

Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World also took me awhile to warm to. But the book really picked up speed for me when the protagonist of the novel, a famous painter who uses his talents to further the Japanese nation-making project, renounces his past activities and beliefs for the sake of marrying off his 26-year-old daughter. The whole story takes place post-War, under the American occupation, when the island is beginning to rebuild and rapidly transform. The story is told in flashbacks. Ono remembers his early days as a painter, training under various teachers, and his relationship with his major teacher who sought to reinvigorate the style and subject matter of Utamaro, using Western techniques and aesthetic approaches. But Ono tires of painting pictures of the pleasure district, geishas, and night scenes lit by lantern light, applying himself to political themes and images which estrange him from his studio. But there is much to be learned in the master's efforts, in his understanding that the floating world is ephemeral, though its pleasures and joys are no less real because of that quality of ephemerality. There is a message here too about living and practicing one's art and life with conviction - whether for political or aesthetic impulses of the heart. Did Ono and his teacher log 10,000 hours of painting time a year, qualifying themselves as savants? I think the more important question is did they practice their art deeply.

It's thrilling to me that the new LA MOCA Director Jeffrey Dietch doesn't drive, nor does he plan to necessarily learn. It's speculated that he may hire young people to drive him around L.A. and show him a window into their own city. David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, myself... who needs driving?!

I am perplexed that the Alkek's print subscription of the L.A. Times is only as current as December 30. And that edition was stamped "received January 14"!

Sad to hear that the artist also known as Rufus Wainwright's mother passed.

Things I learned in Spanish class today:

Tango was once an art form for the poor in Argentina, though today it is for the very wealthy and privileged.

Getting your pocket picked in Barcelona is practically de rigueur.

My Spanish teacher is from Ecuador and she's lived in Missouri, Buffalo, and Nueva York.

SIX PERSIMMONS
for Noko

after ruining another season’s harvest –
over-dried in the kitchen oven then
rehydrated in her home sauna
Aunt Yuki calls upon her sister,

paper sacks stuffed full of orange
fruit, twig and stalk still on
knows that my mother sprouts seedlings
from cast off avocado stones, revives

dead succulents, coaxes blooms out of orchids
a woman who has never spent a moment
of her being on the world wide web,
passes her days painting the diversity of

marshland, woodland, & shoreline;
building her own dehydrator fashioned from
my father’s work ladders, joined together
by discarded swimming pool pole perched

high to discourage the neighbor’s cats
that invade the yard scavenging for koi
“Vitamin D” she says, as she harnesses
the sun, in the backyard the drying device

mutates into painting, slow dripped
sugar spilling out of one kaki fruit
empty space where my father untethers
another persimmon, he swallows whole

Something I forgot to post - the new issue of Reconfigurations is online with a guest-edited folio by Page Starzinger. The interface of the journal's blog site is not the most user-friendly or easy on the eyes... but Page has curated an interesting group of work and written a terrific introduction to her selection.

Just finished Haruki Murakami's After the Quake which seems like very timely reading in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. I first came to Murakami's work in reading his nonfiction project Underground, a series of oral history interviews with survivors of the Tokyo subway gas attacks. I have yet to read the novels and other short story collections for which Murakami is best known, but was very impressed by the stories in After the Quake which follow the thread of several different characters living in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake - witnessing the horrors of the natural disaster through the mediated image of news broadcasts, relief workers traveling to provide on-site aid, and those removed from the situation but with ex-husbands, estranged parents based in Kobe.

It's a been a weird week for passings - my best friend lost her grandmother, and another friend from adolescence, lost her mother to complications from a leg amputation caused by diabetes. All within the same 24 hours.

At work, the lead curator of the Collections finally retired after 13 years on staff, signaling some much needed growth and change, [I hope].

I finished reading Michael Ondaatje's book Anil's Ghost and wonder what it might have been like to read the book, while I was working on writing Adamantine and wonder about how my reading of that novel might now inform any revisions that are made to the collection. There are several wonderful passages in the book that include an exposition on the ritual act of netra mangala, the act of painting in the eyes of a buddha or god, as the last step of activating an idol. Stone is also a theme throughout the book - monuments and their destruction - including the blowing up of religious statuary akin to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. This novel was hauntingly beautiful, political, and deeply interdisciplinary, in its weaving together of poetry, anthropology, history, and religion and I think in some ways triumphs over English Patient.

Happy to report that we officially have cover art for Adamantine, courtesy of the great Keith Carter.

Upcoming spring readings:

WordSpace
Paperbacks Plus
Dallas, TX
February 6, 2010
8:00 p.m.

1913 Press Booksigning
Associated Writing Programs Conference
Denver, CO
April 8, 2010
2:00 p.m.

Naropa University
Boulder, CO
April 12, 2010

Women's Museum of Dallas
Dallas, TX
May 22, 2010
1:30 p.m.

New Poetics

I've been contemplating my personal poetics recently, especially after hearing Rick Benjamin's amazing interview with Chris Lydon on Open Source. Rick's a dear dharma friend and in his interview, he speaks of poetry as a wisdom tradition. And to a degree too, I think of his poetry as being a vessel for the communication of love. His new book which is out any day is called Passing Love after a Langston Hughes' poem, and speaks to the ephemerality but also the exchange between individuals, whether loved ones, reader and poet, etc.

As much as I am able to identify with the notion of poetry as a wisdom tradition, I am not able to articulate my own poetics in this way. Well, not exactly. Lately, I've been reading several books on erotic transference and countertransference in therapeutic relationships. This self-study and exploration were a way to revisit past loves, past therapists, past relationships, etc. Transference and countertransference are present in all relationships - whether with one's lover, child, parents, boss, or former acupuncturist, a friend who works as a stripper in a gentleman's club, that corny movie on the television screen - it presents a tremendous opportunity to work through past wounds and arrive at integrating archetypal symbols into one's own consciousness to become whole. The therapeutic practice is a practice of love and holding space for another, while maintaining neutrality and holding up the mirror. As the person that I am, born into the family that I was, I have had a very thin skin between myself and everything else that's out there. I am a blank canvas for the transference of others - and it is on this level too that poetry and the arts - music, painting, dance, and opera - have deeply moved and affect me. So it is in my poetry that I seek to create the experience of transference and countertransference. Poets talk about creating an immediate experience, moving a reader to identify or empathize, as a vessel to create radical change, whether social or political or personal, as a medium for healing, as a medium for wisdom. For me, I think I have grown perhaps less ambitious or idealistic, or rather that my attention is attuned now to something much finer in its sublety, more intimate, and more infinite. The poem becomes a transformational object.

From David Mann's Erotic Transference and Countertransference: Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy

"The erotic is ubiquitous and at the heart of unconscious experience. As such it is a structuring dynamic in all two-person interactions....Because the erotic is frequently the basis for the most transformational experiences in ordinary life...the therapist, because of his or her own erotic subjectivity, is outside the patient's script, and thereby, the erotic countertransference can enable the patient to experience a different reaction, a new transformational object, that facilitates change and development."

"The patient and the therapist are continuously communicating at an unconscious level. The unconscious is best seen as porous and permeable, allowing experiences and affecting their passage between individuals. In the transference and countertransference the unconscious, with its creative and pathological constituents, will be passing between both participants in the analytic encounter. The therapeutic action can be described by seeing the transference and countertransference as a mutative process whereby both participants modify their unconscious fantasies...the erotic is particularly significant in this respect: it is psychically binding, bringing each individual into a strong conscious and unconscious relationship with others. An erotic bond is forged at a deep emotional level that binds individuals into a relationship with each other at the deepest levels of fantasy. It seems that the transformational potential of the erotic goes right to the heart of the therapeutic transaction and the universality of unconscious erotic fantasy life is what connects and gives this process a good deal of its momentum."

And from Nathan Field's essay "O tell me the truth about love" -
"A four-dimensional relationship is not especially rare, but something that happens to many people at particular moments of their lives...is reached in many ways - in art, in nature, in prayer, in childbirth...just as the shift from the two dimensional to the three dimensional requires the transcending of primary fusion in order to achieve separateness, so the shift from the three dimensional to the four dimensional requires the transcending of the ego in order to achieve this paradoxical state of communion/separation. When the moment of communion happens, there is a sense that healing takes place... for long-term change to establish itself, these intense experiences need to be repeated, perhaps many times, in order to undo the massive mistrust so many patients acquire in childhood."

Hmmmm.... L.A. MOCA has announced its news hire for director who will start in June. Jeffrey Deitch is the first gallerist/entrepreneur to ever occupy the directorship of a museum. The NY Times also has a piece on the news story. And in other news, the director of the Getty has tendered his resignation.

I just finished reading Irene Vilar's new memoir Impossible Motherhood Given the shit storm over this book, in writing and reflecting about it, it seems important to me to identify my own positionality towards the book's subject. So here's disclosure - I do not have any children nor am I presently attempting to become pregnant, I have never experienced pregnancy, and I am pro-choice.

I had some problems with the title that was ultimately arrived at to market the book - the full title is Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict. Every word in the subtitle is loaded. If this is a "testimony", I'm not sure who the audience for that testimony is - Vilar doesn't have an explicitly political message to deliver in the book. She also writes of her early identification with Anne Frank's written testimonial of life during Nazi occupation. Perhaps the word screams to much of legalese to me - a sworn statement of the author's experience, asserting credibility vs. allowing the narrative to gradually win the reader over to empathy. The "of an" are in italicized typeface on the cover, spine, and cover page of the book - this again seems deliberately conspicuous - a way to highlight and undermine a particular kind of authority - while the "testimony" establishes the veracity of the narrative, highlighting "of an" attempts to undercut the universality of the testimonial. "Abortion Addict" - abortion on its own may have been less of a red flag, but there is an undertone of clinical diagnosis and illness here with the addition of the word "addict" that seems perhaps too shocking. And it is this title which I think has created a certain amount of backlash for the author - the lay criticism that came out before the book's release reflected to me that these critics had not read the book, as the comments that they were making about abortion and abortion rights are actually addressed within Vilar's book. Namely that she knew that she abused a legal right, as did many of the doctors in the book who expressed concern and reservation about her case. But the title, I think, evokes a certain kind of resistance and aversion from a certain kind of reader, which makes it difficult to give the book a true chance.

All that said - This is a haunting and well-written memoir which I read within the course of a day. While the topic of repetitive abortion (the first abortion does not occur until about 1/4 into the book) as birth control is the organizing subject of the book - this book is really about feminine wounding and the author's journey towards awakening feminine strength within herself to be able to mother herself, extricate herself from unloving, life-depleting relationships, and to ultimately transform her own life and experiences through the act of breaking a pattern, choosing differently, and having a child after 15 successful abortions. At the age of 12, the author loses her mother when she commits suicide. Vilar then willingly goes off to American boarding school at 15 to escape this loss. From that time on, she only returns to her family in Puerto Rico sporadically. Entering college at the age of 17, she becomes embroiled in a relationship with a professor, about 30 years her senior - a man who has married and remarried and refuses to have children. He is himself a writer, and full of ego and plagued with boundary issues - particular to empowerment and money and gender roles. A man who may have never received much mothering, or fathering, in his own life. Vilar eventually marries her professor who she clings to as a sort of heroic figure, but after so many abortions and years of marriage and her growing success as a writer, the marriage breaks down completely. There are other relationships with men that the author details, but the professor is central. There are many moments in their relationship when she longs for his love and approval and he is a stand in for both an absent mother and father.

The book ends with an epilogue that breaks the structure of the narrative before it. Rather than being written in prose chapters, the final section is split into dated journal entries and gives the sense of life-in-progress, vs. history in the far past. In the last two sections of the book before the epilogue, the author begins her wind up and reflection over the project - connecting the dots between her family's various addictions to her own treatment of her body. It is in these final sections that she talks about the highs and lows of going off of birth control pills, discovering that she was pregnant and going through an abortion. It is understandable, given the long-term therapeutic process and how integration occurs slowly and layers of meaning surface piece by piece - however, I think that the narrative could have been strengthened by weaving these strands and realizations into certain sections of the book - yet realization occurs after the fact of our experiences in therapy, but I think that more reflection and insight throughout the main retelling of the story, could have deepened a connection with her reader.

Dribble

Scribble a word for each
drop of the player's ball.
Break the line when ball connects
w/ backboard. End the poem
at an interval of silence.

Pinata Piece

Stuff a covered cardboard structure
w/ your favorite language.
Document words breaking over a surface.
Let the bat be your pen.
Cork if necessary.

Bingo

carve your favorite words
on one-inch wooden rounds
toss inside a spinning
antique cage that shoots
them out a chute then
record the results

Unnecessary Objects

Nude and Bingo cage, 2010

Kort and I received an invitation to climb Enchanted Rock and eat black-eyed pea soup on New Year's Day. The combo of starting out the year at a high point and partaking in a Southern good luck ritual was irresistible. I didn't take many pictures of the main rock, but here's a photo of the Little Rock for illustrative purposes:



And here we are at the top of the rock dome at the geo marker.


Approaching the rock reminded me of climbing up the sand dunes in Dunhuang. Distant figures scrambling up the incline. But rock is a lot easier to climb then sand, though my boots slid quite a bit on this surface.


Not a lot of vegetation on the rock surface (no soil) but scatterings of prickly pear and bluestem. Factoid: there are a number of small pockets on the rock surface that fill with water when it rains. A microscopic-sized shrimp regenerates in this habitat and can be seen swimming the surface of the tiny pools.