Marvin Gaye "What's Going On / What's Happening Brother"

Listening to Marvin Gaye and cleaning up the room. Life is good.

I realize I've been wanting to be friends and allies with people who aren't my "friend" or my "ally". Recognizing that I deserve better. Recognizing that it's their loss not mine! Recognizing that I can write and be happy with new allies and new "friends"-- people who really truly are my friend and vise versa. People who forgive my past, my illness and are there for me today. I will be there for them too.

Feeling freed up as I revised 5 poems from the 7Seven manuscript. I feel like now I'm on the way towards sending it out soon. I have notes from three reviewers that recommend publication, but I need to make revisions, so I'm not sure where it will end up at press wise, but I feel like I'm getting back into the groove, listening to Marvin Gaye and lightening up overall. I'm leaning towards the reviewers as now I see their critical comments were on the money, but I am considering sending it out to a few contests, but I know that's like throwing a needle into a haystack...

So, what's going on?

I'm feeling more free and better than I have in years. I love writing! Still looking at Sherwin Bitsui's FLOOD SONG and learning a few helpful things. Still reading Julia Cameron's FINDING WATER: THE ART OF PRESERVERANCE. Still feeling like I'm growing and learning.

Will be moving into an apartment soon. I got the go ahead recently and will get keys as soon as I do some paperwork on Monday I believe. Yay! I have a great roomate full of wisdom and heart. Lalalalalalalalalala lala!

Let's see if I can post on the right blog this time;)

I am at a coffee shop getting ready to revise my 7Seven manuscript. I have got to buckle down and do this, even one line. Geez.

Mozart's Requiem (Part 1)

I've been stuck in 2008. I need to be able to forgive myself to move on.

I'm reading Sherwin Bitsui's FLOOD SONG and learning.

I have a ways to go, but Bitsui's language has been a joy to read.This book is strange and fluid, filled with oddly tantalizing juxtapositions. Mostly I am taking in the strong verbs which wrap themselves in layers. I made a list of some of them: splintered, wails, paint, twists, scalpel ed, carved, lick, shiver, clasp and fasten, slices, sniffed, coiling, uncoil, strung, fruit (as a verb), and so forth. After a while I want some symmetry or narrative, but I keep coming back to the poems and it is quite fulfilling. The organic mingles with the mechanical, and nature evolves and dissolves and raptures in new and unexpected ways. I like these poems.

Here's a very brief excerpt:

"Dove's eyes black as nightfall
Shiver on the foam coast of an arctic dream
where whale ribs clasp and fasten you to the language of shifting ice."


7

The whales remind me of a blowhole in one of Emmy Perez's poems, poems which I should have spent more time than I did with. I have a whale poem in my next collection, tentatively titled 7 Seven. The number of perfection biblical my aunt tells me. Seven sins, Seven charities. But it is about the losses and recoveries we breathe.

I was at a loss in 2008. I snapped. I frightened friends and good people. I was an angry sack, a mouth of bones, a reckless driver towards the dark, but today I had a bit of a breakthrough after what seems to truly be 3 years. I am stuck. I have been restless. And I seek renewal through language again in some strange way. It's a new path, the next step is a step out of the old and into the new light.


My aunt showed me a sketch of a hand, outstretched emerging from shadow to light. So simple, so elegant, And yes her religion has her seeing the light as God, but for me it is that Yin Yang that S spoke about so freely. Her laughter was lavender and sunlight and her language lanyap. I miss her terribly still.


I'm thinking today that there's nothing wrong with all the cicadas I have pulled out of poems for fear that the word was too unpopular.

In any case, breakthroughs are a relief yet painful and I recognize that I'm not quite fitting in online. The episode in 2008 was bad and I have to forgive myself for this, and let go of lost relationships, broken friendships, lost jobs and falling.

I have to write again.

*

Today I drew a nose and an eye and geometrical figures shaded and winding lines, coiling and uncoiling---very still pencil lines, and some shading around the nose. So, with encouragement I think I will draw some more. But the fact is admire Bitsui's book and encourage you to read it if you haven't done so already. Similarly, Emmy Perez's SOLSTICE is a gift I missed in some ways, a gift of language play and stars in bellies. The blowhole disturbed me, knocked me out of some comfortable expectation of softness, peace. It is still with me.


In any case, I must forgive myself and get out of 2008 since it's 2011.

'
Maybe you can help. I long to speak with people about poetry again. Send me an email. I have time to read and respond more carefully than I once did. I can send you my cell phone number and we can chat. I've already hit someone up with the idea of talking. So maybe my online time is coming to an end? I don't know. We'll have to see. Fact of the matter is that ignorance prevails and stygma stings. I understood today that I do have an illness which apparently gets worse with age. I ask my community, that loves to call itself a community for help in getting me healthy. I'd like to thank Carmen Seda for hanging in there the last 3 years when I've clearly not been well and CG. Blessings to those that give. Please also consider reading AN UNQUIET MIND.Peace

anna nalick - wreck of the day (acoustic)

Can't sleep. It's 3: 47 a.m.. Thinking about how I have only revised one poem since I haven't been working, and how I need to be more disciplined. I have worries that I can't write anymore. I also seem to wake up at 4 a.m. a lot.

Well, I have no excuses anymore. I mean for the writing. I wanted to apply for Dobie Paisano, but I can't spend the $30.00, likewise for the $50.00 Macondo fee. We'll see. I doubt I will be able to apply but you never know I may gamble, but it's a big gamble, no? I need to use the money to join a gym or rec center. I'm like Oprah, only worse.

Well, I might as well try to revise a poem while I'm awake.

Jack Johnson - All At Once

"It is all too easy to think of art as something we aspire to, an ideal by which to measure our efforts and find them falling woefully short. Well, that is one way to think of art, and God knows we have bludgeoned ourselves with it pretty thoroughly. Our concepts of "great art" and "great artists" are often less something we aspire to than something we use to denigrate our own effort. We might want to try thinking about art a little differently. 'Art' is less about what we could be and more about what we are than we normally acknowledge. When we are fixated on getting better, we miss what it is we already are-- and this is dangerous because we-- as we are-- are the origin of our art. 'We' are what makes our art original. If we are always striving to be something more and something different, we dilute the power of what it is we actually are. Doing that, we dilute our art."-- Julia Cameron from THE ARTIST'S WAY EVERY DAY: A YEAR OF CREATIVE LIVING.

I'm at Starbucks because I couldn't focus at the house with the t.v. running 24-7. I am going to stop saying "should". It's not very easy. I am going to start moving my things out slowly to the apartment. I got the news today. I'm looking forward to it, but I will miss where I've been as I've received a lot of gifts, helpfulness and kindness, but it's time to move on. I'm ready.

I want to start walking and may walk around the lake today. I'm staying in Denver and will be moving to Lakewood. I will miss Starbucks and the coffee shop in old Town Arvada, but I can go to the library with a thermos of coffee and get just as much out of it, probably more.

I blather, but seriously will try to write some today. I think the quote above is very helpful in our product oriented society. It so often comes down to people asking each other what it is they "do". I will be able to answer, "I write poems," now. I may volunteer, but I'm moving on to a new phase of my life, and it feels pretty good today, but I still have a little cash today. I think time will be good for me and less stress will also be good.

Anna Nalick - Breathe (2AM)

Time to begin revising the manuscript. No excuses!

C says there's no such thing as justice. I suspect she's right? Maybe there's karma, but sometimes I agree with Faulkner--"A man is the sum of his misfortunes."

Today I have two letters to write. Yes, I still write letters.

All is well. Listening to Anna Nalick's WRECK OF THE DAY which I got for Christmas.

Jack Johnson - You And Your Heart

This is my first day not working. I took my mother to the airport this morning and am now getting some final bills I need to take care of. So, soon I'll be dead broke and unemployed. It feels okay. I will try to write a bit this week and hope to god that something happens. The blank page has stared at me hard for some time. I will try to get busy once I move into an apartment; the moving part will be a pain in the butt, and that too is only yet another temporary move. Not sure where I'll end up but am starting to accept that I have a disability now. It's a long story, but I have to get back on track to getting well so I can work and do something of substance to help other people live.

Years ago I wrote on this blog about people having too narrow a sense of aesthetics and how the marginalization and favoritism of particular sensibilities is unfair. Now it's the new thing despite folks having lambasted Billy Collins etc.

In a recent essay, I lambaste mediocrity in the name of diversity and/or mere politics masquerading as art. There's a difference in my mind and there is a sense of flat mediocre language, dull images and so forth that deaden art and turn it into mere political platform. This is not to say art can't be political, but yes, it should be "good". There's a lot of things that make a poem good to my mind. But contemporary American poetry is a farce in a lot of ways. There's not much to be done about it but grow and read and write. I think there's more involved in that solitary act than I had previously thought. Yes, we want community, but artists are artists, not politicians nor activists. They can be both but they are not mutually exclusive and the expectation that one be a politician following a particular narrow brand of belief expectations is simply lame. Be free. Believe what you believe.