Monday, November 29, 2010

Cat Stevens(Yusuf Islam) Never Wanted to Be a Star



Reading Sherman Alexie's "Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock.

I really like the stories such as this one out of his book THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO FIST FIGHT IN HEAVEN. Reading Alexie makes we want to try writing fiction again, or at the least literary non-fiction. Blah, I'm all talk; it's time to begin writing.

The semester is over in two weeks. I'll be broke but freed up like there's no tomorrow.

I think I like the way Alexie's work makes these almost magical connections or associations. For example, "I figured she was the kind of woman who could make buffalo walk on up to her and give up their lives. She wouldn't have needed to hunt. Every time we went walking, birds would follow us around. Hell, tumbleweeds would follow us around."

Also this quote is something that I liked, "We didn't talk much. One, because my father didn't talk much when he was sober, and two because Indians don't need to talk to communicate."

These are both from "Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play, 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock. What a title! It makes me want to write some really long titles as well; maybe some poems titled stuff like, "My Uncle Mike who once drank a bottle of tequila and ate the worm in El Paso, Texas."

I think people are jealous or envious of Alexie, seriously. Sorry, but the man wrote a good book, and his poems are good too. A long while back I read FANCY DANCING and thought it was wonderful. Ah, yeah, nasty ole narrative. I think too people dislike Billy Collins because he is so very popular, but THE ART OF DROWNING is a good book. That's not to say that I don't like John Ashbery!


Envy. Oh how we all fall prey to it. I hope to be freer about that. I think I should try to play video games a bit too as I've missed out on that aspect of life.

Cheers.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Jack Johnson - Upside Down (Sessions@AOL)



I wonder if this video will work. Oh well, in any case Thanksgiving was wonderful at the house. I have to grade a number of student papers today before heading out to Commerce City to hang out with a friend.

Poetry and I are quite the strangers these days. I hope to start writing in Jan. when I move into an apt. with a roommate. I won't have a desk, but will try to utilize the kitchen table. It's already furnished, so it should be more comfortable than most places I've lived. I did get one poem published in Women's Study Quarterly, but I need to try to publish again since I haven't in a very long time.

My mother is coming up to Denver after Christmas and I'm quite excited, as she has never visited. I have an aunt here, whom I rarely see, that we will visit.

I think I may try to do some volunteer work when I'm not working, but I'm not sure what kind as I will be reliant on the bus. I will no longer have the car as I will no longer be able to afford it. Maybe I can do something worthwhile at the center.

I am going to rest and heal and hopefully be more pleasant to deal with in the future. :)

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

I am thankful for where I am staying and the help I am receiving. It's been a long haul trying to learn to accept I have an illness, an illness that proves embarrassing and cost me one good friendship.

Oh well.

I wish I could be more philosophical in my posts, but I can't really postulate and premise about philosophical things. These posts are more for my sanity, I think.

I may post a list of what I'm thankful for later.

Cheers.

Jack Johnson - Upside Down (Sessions@AOL)



I wonder if this video will work. Oh well, in any case Thanksgiving was wonderful at the house. I have to grade a number of student papers today before heading out to Commerce City to hang out with a friend.

Poetry and I are quite the strangers these days. I hope to start writing in Jan. when I move into an apt. with a roommate. I won't have a desk, but will try to utilize the kitchen table. It's already furnished, so it should be more comfortable than most places I've lived. I did get one poem published in Women's Study Quarterly, but I need to try to publish again since I haven't in a very long time.

My mother is coming up to Denver after Christmas and I'm quite excited, as she has never visited. I have an aunt here, whom I rarely see, that we will visit.

I think I may try to do some volunteer work when I'm not working, but I'm not sure what kind as I will be reliant on the bus. I will no longer have the car as I will no longer be able to afford it. Maybe I can do something worthwhile at the center.

I am going to rest and heal and hopefully be more pleasant to deal with in the future. :)

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

I am thankful for where I am staying and the help I am receiving. It's been a long haul trying to learn to accept I have an illness, an illness that proves embarrassing and cost me one good friendship.

Oh well.

I wish I could be more philosophical in my posts, but I can't really postulate and premise about philosophical things. These posts are more for my sanity, I think.

I may post a list of what I'm thankful for later.

Cheers.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Julia Cameron and creativity

"The flow off creativity is a constant. We are the ones who are fickle or fearful. I have learned that my creative condition and my spiritual condition are one in the same. Making art is an act of faith, a movement toward expansion. When I am stymied in my work, I am stymied in my spiritual condition. When I am self-conscious as an artist, I am spiritually constricted. I need to pray to lose my self-centered fears. I need to ask for selflessness, to be a conduit, a channel for ideas to move through...It is time to let Something or Somebody write through me. How the ego hates this humbling proposition! And yet, great art is born of great humility."

from FINDING WATER: THE ART OF PERSEVERANCE by Julia Cameron, author of THE ARTIST'S WAY

I have had difficulty believing in a god, moreso, difficulty being spiritual, having faith, seeing beyond what is visible and tangible. Yet, Cameron's books inspire me. I bought the following books yesterday:

THE ARTIST'S WAY EVERY DAY: A YEAR OF CREATIVE LIVING

TRANSITIONS: PRAYERS AND DECLARATIONS FOR A CHANGING LIFE

FINDING WATER: THE ART OF PERSEVERANCE

all by Julia Cameron, and I also bought Nietzsche's THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA.

Probably should hold on to money now as I will literally have none for 6 months to about 2 years, but I find the books helpful and they will give me something to do with my time that will hopefully inspire me to write. I also want to paint, but I can't really afford paint. My mom may give me some of her oils/acrylics. I can at least sketch and hopefully sketch poems. But there's something to the quote above about spirituality or as one person called it: mysticism.

I am thinking about S today again and recognizing the toll grief can have on us. Grief is the path to renewal? In any case, I have grieved a long time. It's time to move on and stop holding others into being subconscious representations of S. She was a good woman, a blessed friend, and she's gone now. I need to say goodbye? But I carry her image still.

S most definitely thought creativity was tied to divinity, not that we are makers and creators, but that IT works through us. P was/is an atheist. I think I let the atheism lead me to think belief in the divine silly, too hopeful. And just like the movie THE INVENTION OF LYING, I tend to see god and the divine as a big lie, made to comfort us in the vast emptiness in which we exist briefly like the grass. But S's belief in the universe as the universe seems to work for me. But the fact of the matter is perhaps the lack of spirituality leads one to a place of apathy or disinterest in the movements of that universal dance of energy S believed in so adamantly.

It is the reality of weakness, of injustice and inequality that make it difficult to believe that there is some divine justice, some strange mechanism or flow at work that resolves these apparent conflicts. It seems focusing on injustice and weakness and power can lead us to be stymied in our writing, and death, god, that makes us stop and recognize our own fragility, our own doom.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Yusuf Islam Maybe There's a World Live Echo 2007



Okay, somehow I got decent evals. This is weird. Someone says it's because I'm doing okay and I usually want to be outstanding. Outstanding is not possible when one teaches five classes on three different campuses and experiences utter disorganization and memory problems. In any case, maybe there's hope for the future, but I will not be teaching in the spring or fall and possibly again. I will be doing little other than writing and reading. I hope and pray I don't neglect doing so! Poverty is the route to poetry? I think so. I think the act and experience of writing poems is something at odds with our culture of consumption and greed and need. I don't know. Maybe poetry will continue to elude me; maybe I won't write again, but I suspect I will. I think the poverty aspect of things will truly suck, but I will have my days to ponder, to create, to sculpt and hopefully, most importantly to heal.

Revising 7 is going to be a monstrous task, but luckily someone has edited the thing for comma issues and other such errors. I feel quite good despite having a horrendous week of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, not being in the right place at the right time and have let supervisors know I won't be able to take classes I've been assigned.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Failures, difficulties and renewal

My post yesterday was a bit much I suppose. I was not doing too well. In any case, I have to go teach in a bit, 1-1 conferences. Really ready for the break. Really, really ready for the break.

I will not be working starting around Dec. 9th. I hope that I will utilize all the time I will have towards writing/revising 7, which needs to be revised before it can get an actual contract to publish, but I plan on revising it in December.

I am concerned I will get bored not working, but my disorganization of late has caused me severe difficulties teaching and 7-11 was also difficult for me. In any case, I hope to be writing again soon. I have kept up journaling, but I haven't written any creative pieces for a long while.

We are reading Sherman Alexie next which is always a good thing, I think. But my ability to focus for long periods of time is shot. I have to break everything up into steps and have, according to some, slowed down quite a bit. I am feeling like a failure in some ways, but teaching classes as an adjunct is most definitely not the end-all of things. I will take time off and hopefully find my writing picking up again. The semester has been a real wash. I have utterly failed at teaching, but need to say it's okay to take care of myself, to put my health first.

This society is weird. You aren't supposed to admit to shortcomings, failures, difficulties. But I do. I can't stand being someone I'm not, but writing has been nothing but a lot of hot air from my desk. Okay, I don't have a desk, but I do have a lap top. But I have been a lot of talk and no action.

I will be moving into an apartment with a roommate in January, and although I'm looking forward to it I'm a bit nervous as I have a ton of crap in storage, most of which I need to get rid of.

I am not much of a blogger. I mean I blog, but it is I suppose mostly to let off steam and focus a bit. Sorry, I am not very funny nor have much of an audience anymore, so I blog for myself, my sanity.

In some ways I feel like a failure, as I did not teach today and got sorta busted for it. I am simply tired and have been needing this rest and am very, very lucky that I can take it. 2008 is when I needed a break, to slow down and I didn't and the price I paid for not taking a break was/is indeed high.

I will grade a couple of papers then head to the CC to have conferences. Last night students didn't show, but it was snowing.

They say failure is the way to success. I sure as hell hope so.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Poet Charles Simic reads from Selected Poems 1963-2003

Denise Levertov: six poems

There's a beauty in sadness? I am thinking of Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl" were horrible Holocaust imagery is juxtaposed by images of light and springtime. I think most literature that appeals to me brings together such polarities. And they say that no literature is "great" anymore? Chicano/a literature is merely anything written by a Chicano, or someone who identifies as Chicano or moreso Latino? Do we trust our tastes, our cognitive beliefs about what is great art? Or is it, as the C says, like pornography; you know it when you read it?

With all the talk about conceptual art and all of the anti-narrative slant that is so extremely popular now, I feel a disconnect a splitting if you will betweeen the work I like and what one is expected to like. For example, I like Billy Collins. He has a doctorate, I believe in Romantic Literature, and I do not believe for a second that he is always lighthearted and uninterested in our mortality. He seems to be a rallying point for the disgruntled. Thank god we are not all alike. I think if anything his focus is more on living and dying than joking around. People also dislike Tony Hoagland for some of the same reasons. Some readers find his work unnervingly sexist, but I like some of his work too. I don't believe that one's work must be inherently political to be moving to readers. I think there is a place for lightheartedness and humor. I so wish I could find it in my own work, or my lack of work, for I haven't written in years. I mean, I wrote at Yaddo, but it was fleeting and I haven't had the time or inclination to revise.

Does this make me a "bad" poet, one who is uneducated in the proper manner towards experimentation and linguistic play? I don't believe I am uninterested in language or lyricism, but it seems that one must be swept away in the "now" to appear credible as a poet? I remember interviewing with Notre Dame and the hostility directed towards me because I wrote at times narratively and it was assumed I didn't know what was going on in the "now". Is that a word? narratively?

Recently I finished writing an essay about Diana Garcia and if you will, Chicano/a literature. Is there a place for greatness among Chicano literature or is anyone who writes anything considered an artist writing for la causa?

I am not down with it. I am suspect of any writing that comes flowing out being viewed as literature. I am concerned that most, in my current estimation, do not differentiate literature or art from mere propaganda and politics. There is a difference in my opinion, and I add the little "in my opinion" to cushion my growing isolation, my growing desparateness from other Latino/a writers and poets.

Maybe it is simply a reaction to the fact I will not be teaching. I am taking a real hiatus from teaching and I do not know how long it will last. It may be forever. I will be applying for social security and find the Latino "community" quite non-communal. This is not necessarily true on the whole as I do feel I have particular "allies," but they tend to be fiction writers.

I find the work of poet as a solitary thing. I mean one can participate in writing groups, collectives and discussions, but the work of a poet is still to me like the work of a long distance runner, solitary. I find the pooling together of resources potentially helpful, but the reality is that there are some of us who do not fit into the group? Perhaps it is our own feeling of being disconnected to it more than anything real.

The idea of being part of a team does appeal to me, but the fact of the matter is that Latino/a poetry or poetries (and I remember a non-poets eye roll at that term) does not seem some unified front where everyone is treated well or even acknowledged. The bias for instance that I see at one time drove me crazy, but now, I sense that there's not a lot I can do about it other than to try to keep on writing.

Today people slammed Denise Levertov for appropriating the Vietnameese experience of war and conflict. I am often taken aback at the disinterest people have in lyricism and what is beautiful. Is beauty dead? Archaic? Why then to I still find light contrasted with darkness so necessary, so urgently calling out to me?

I should spend more time on what I write here and write more critically, more specifically of particular poets and what they have written I suppose, but over all the sense of jaded-ness I feel towards what we call American Poetry is probably simply my sense of outsider-ness among my own kind? I am the silence I wrote about in Pity the Drowned Horses, a book that most definitely fell through the cracks into oblivion. I do have someone interested in publishing my second collection, which I feel strangely ambivalent towards. I feel outside of it in a strange way, yet others do like it, but the reaction seems mixed, uneven.

For I have never been all Mexican or all American. I haven't even felt accepted by most Latino/a poets. I find them fair-weather at best; behind me when things are going well for me, yet they are utterly disinterested in one's traummas, difficulties, financial or emotional, for this is after all a business. This is one thing that I hope to separate myself from others.

I may not be a teacher, nor a politician, nor a mover and shaker, but I think and hope that I am to some degree a poet. It took me years before I could call myself a poet, much less a writer, and throughout grad school I was told I was not Latina. I didn't I suppose fit into some mold. My identity as Latina is something I chose? Was it thrust upon me while running the streets of Lubbock and being told to "go back to Mexico." I don't know.

I feel this concept that there is no greatness or relevance any longer to be somewhat disconcerting. Someone once responded on this blog that they just wanted to read about other culutures sometimes and did not care if was "good" literature.
I also was challenged once to define "good".

So possibly I will revise my essay outlining what is good and what can be viewed a "bad" or mediocre. Overall, I feel a disparity between publicity given to some "friends" over publicity given to those we are not feeling particularly close to, and it is this very disparity that used to upset me so.

But now, I am simply wondering if I will ever write again. I think I will soon. The difficulty of teaching has come down on me hard this semester. I can not under any circumstances continue to be an "adjunct" instructor. It has simply taken its toll. I will take a hiatus and try to write some poetry and some criticism.

So I have blathered on the blog. But over all, I am disappointed in what is called the "community" as I have gone through some rough times, with no member, no "activist" out there giving a damn. I have learned therefore that business is simply business and there is little truly "communal" about it.

The heirerachy's exist and there is still marginalization and there is even further marginalization among the marginalized themselves.

I have put up with some humiliating comments and posts from people who have felt it was their place to scold me and get me to shut up. The silence demanded is no different that the silence that was demanded of me, in terms of being political, when I was a grad student.

But the world has little to no interest in us poets. Maybe being political is the way to go? I find political talkers often to be the first to be disinterested in other's true traumas or difficulties. They hold their positions of power and invite one another to readings all the while disowning the poor among us. These are simply realities that can not and do not shadow the joy of writing.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Cat Stevens - Hard Headed Woman (live)



At the Jefferson County Public library grading papers, or should I say, taking a break from grading papers. It will be odd next semester to have no papers to grade, but hopefully I will actually begin to write again. I read and am re-reading poems by Janice Mirikitani, a Japanese-American poet. Her work is interestingly bold, sad and moving. I think we like to forget about Japanese internment camps in WW2. Similarly, I find younger people more and more feeling like race, culture and difference are no longer problems, yet one young man did mention SB 1070 which I was calling SB 1022. Maybe it is due to a generation gap; I'm not sure anymore but people seem to want to avoid the issue at all costs or at least minimize it, say they are colorblind or imply that. In any case, Janice Mirikitani's work is interesting to me because it obviously has been so marginalized.

Monday, November 08, 2010

Jack Johnson - Go On



I still have some trouble getting into Ginsberg's "HOWL". Is it because it was frowned upon as self-indulgent when I was getting indoctrinated in grad school into what poetry is good and what poetry is bad poetry? I really do find him a bit self-indulgent I think, but I like "America" and the poem "I Am Waiting" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

"...I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder."

-- Ferlinghetti

I used to be in awe of wonder, the clouds, movement of them, the sunlight beating gently against my face. I think there will soon be time for wonder again.

I can't have poems without it.

Who was it that said a poet had 15 years? I don't think so. But yes, something of that innocence and wonder goes. Well, next year will be a year of seeking beauty.

Sunday, November 07, 2010

AMERICAN MASTERS | Neil Young Helpless | PBS



I'm still on blogger, but will try to share some videos via facebook. Facebook seems a bit overwhelming and I need to answer Martin's email and will, soon. I need a writing group here in Denver.

I'm going to work on writing more critically here soon. Writing both critically and creatively is the goal. I need about four more weeks to gather steam.

The Band - Forever Young



I should be grading papers, but find it almost impossible today. I will begin anew tomorrow. It's the end of the line in any case, 4 more weeks. I simply can't focus on it.

Allen Ginsberg



The beats-- intellectual hipsters. Counter-culture. And yes, Kaddish seems the better poem.
Maybe I'm partial because I too am close to my mother, and borne out of poverty and the desert dust, I sense the separateness of socio-economic classes among marginalized groups like Latinos. The fact is, we simply have difficulty understanding that which we have not experienced. Who can imagine?

Allen Ginsberg Reading Howl (Part 1)



Well, it has been pointed out to me that I write well critically, and that I should do that kind of writing on the blog, rather than the kind of personal narrative that I do. In any case, I'll wait to see if editors like it as much as non-editors. Perhaps it's time I write some more reviews for the El Paso Times or more essays like the one I just finished (rough draft).

I was encouraged to dislike Ginsberg in grad school, but I like the people getting kicked out of the academies. For some reason, that makes me feel better as I too have been cast out!

Monday, November 01, 2010

Jim Croce - Which Way Are You Goin'



Paul Martinez Pompa is blogging at the Poetry Foundation!
How does it feel to be free of illusion?

Invisible Man replies: painful and empty

In the preface to SHADOW AND ACT Ralph Ellison says of his struggle to become a writer:

"I found the greatest difficulty for a negro writer was the problem of revealing what he truly felt, rather than serving up what Negroes were supposed to feel, and were encouraged to feel. And linked to this was the difficulty based on our long habit of deception and evasion, of depicting what really happened within our areas of American life, and putting with honesty and without bowing to ideological expediencies the attitudes and values which give Negro American life its sense of wholeness and which renders it bearable and human and, when measured by our own terms, desirable."

In his essay, "The World and the Jug" he says,

"...when the work of negro writers has been rejected they have all too often protected their egos by blaming racial discrimination, while turning away from the obvious fact that good art-- and Negro musicians are present to demonstrate this--- commands attention to itself...And they forget that publishers will publish almost anything which is written with even a minimum of competency."

"Ellison is, in other words, more concerned with the way a man confronts his individual doom than with the derivation of that doom; not pathos, but power, in its deepest inner sense, is what concerns him."---- John Crowe Ransom

*

I first read Ralph Ellison as a freshman at Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, Texas in 1984. I was stunned by his work and am still am today. It is brutal in its depiction of how African-Americans were brutalized in the south.

*

I won't be teaching in the spring. My life will take a drastic turn towards a steep finanical fall, but it is the best thing for me at this time. I am frightened but feel more free, a bit more healthy and ready to move on to another phase in my life. It is definitely not what I had anticipated for myself, but things have come to a cross roads, and I must take care of my health and try to write again, so I stay healthy.

Cheers.