In the Presence of Absence

 "You, who only know love when in love, do not ask what it is, nor do you look for it. But when a woman once asked you if you were in love with love itself, you were evasive and escaped by answering: I love you. She persisted: Do you not love love? You said: I love you, because of you. She left you, because you could not be trusted with her absence. Love is not an idea. It is an emotion that can cool down or heat up. It comes and goes. It is an embodied feeling and has five, or more, senses. Sometimes it appears as an angel with delicate wings that can uproot us from the earth. Sometimes it charges at us like a bull, hurls us to the ground, and walks away. At other times it is a storm we only recognize in its devastating aftermath. Sometimes it falls upon us like the night dew when a magical hand milks a wandering cloud."

In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish - Palestinian national poet.

Moving on

For now, this is my/our last day in Portugal. Tomorrow at 03h I will go to the airport for my flight to the US.

"Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena se a alma nao e pequena."
"Was it worth it? Everything is worth it if the soul is not small."
Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese poet

"I know not what tomorrow will bring."
He died the next day. 

Phase One

Phase One” from Bring Now the Angels
by Dilruba Ahmed, 2020


For leaving the fridge open
last night, I forgive you.
For conjuring white curtains
instead of living your life.

For the seedlings that wilt, now,
in tiny pots, I forgive you.
For saying no first
but yes as an afterthought.

I forgive you for hideous visions
after childbirth, brought on by loss
of sleep. And when the baby woke
repeatedly, for your silent rebuke

in the dark, “What’s your beef?”
I forgive your letting vines
overtake the garden. For fearing
your own propensity to love.

For losing, again, your bag
en route from San Francisco;
for the equally heedless drive back
on the caffeine-fueled return.

I forgive you for leaving
windows open in rain
and soaking library books
again. For putting forth

only revisions of yourself,
with punctuation worked over,
instead of the disordered truth,
I forgive you. For singing mostly

when the shower drowns
your voice. For so admiring
the drummer you failed to hear
the drum. In forgotten tin cans,

may forgiveness gather. Pooling
in gutters. Gushing from pipes.
A great steady rain of olives
from branches, relieved

of cruelty and petty meanness.
With it, a flurry of wings, thirteen
gray pigeons. Ointment reserved
for healers and prophets. I forgive you.

I forgive you. For feeling awkward
and nervous without reason.
For bearing Keats’s empty vessel
with such calm you worried

you had, perhaps, no moral
center at all. For treating your mother
with contempt when she deserved
compassion. I forgive you. I forgive

you. I forgive you. For growing
a capacity for love that is great
but matched only, perhaps,
by your loneliness. For being unable

to forgive yourself first so you
could then forgive others and
at last find a way to become
the love that you want in this world.

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti leaves

 Lawrence Ferlinghetti died last night. He had a good long run, a hundred and one years. I'm guessing he outlived almost everyone who from San Francisco's original beat scene. Uncle John turned me on to what was happening in North Beach when I was a kid. I couldn't wait to go there and to Ferlinghetti's bookstore, City Lights, and did eventually when I got old enough. The whole scene was another 'boy's club' of course but the writing and music was good, kicked some walls down. It's still there, by the way, the bookstore, and worth a visit next time you're in SF.

Paris Review obit

Amanda Gorman

The Hill We Climb, Amanda Gorma's brilliant poem and presentation was the highlight of the Biden/Harris inauguration, at least for me. And, yes, Biden's and Harris' speeches were perfectly suited to the gravity and and hopefulness of the situation.

And all this happening at the Capital building where, only days before, a radical right-wing mob, activated during the last four years when Republicans controlled all three houses of government, was climbing the Capital walls in an attempt to take over America and replace it with their version of fascism.

Lines Past Death

I sat with my Uncle all day the day he died. That was Saturday, February 1, 1992. These poems greeted me when I brought his ashes home to Southern Oregon a few days later. He had mailed them to me from Portland the day before he died, Friday, January 31. In the accompanying letter he  wrote, “All I need is a chance at a new peace”. He died the next evening with me sitting by his side, our faces touching, breathing together. I’ve taken the liberty of calling this collection, “LINES PAST DEATH”.

LINES PAST DEATH

The two were dressed in black, in what seemed like rented clothes.  They went to the man in the next stall, be still, is all I could do.  The man had died.  They took him away on a palette covered with a royal maroon cover and deposited him in a long station wagon.  So he passed his time, in a setting of principles.  No more to be seen.  Only the rented costume comes to mind as I write.  THAT was a fancy way to leave his guest.  Like a disappearance. 


#2

evergreen and birch trees and a small bed of roses…low evergreen shrubs and a lawn on either side of an entrance walk.  Crows scan the higher branches and frighten other birds.  The distance cold alerts one and the winter sun tries to subdue the body’s alarm.  Still, it is day, and we have the whole affect of nature to subdues us    and bring peace.


WINTER

A stalwart, winter day,
seen through the vibran
escapade of voices,
leaves me to wonder at the meaning left behind.
enlivening the shadow of this,
puts the mind at ease.
Where the January sun causes
steam to rise from the grass,
enfeebling cold fingers more.
To move is a mundane project
of prospects made whole
by the failing man seeking
to encase the situation
into something respective to itself.
Cold out, he said and felt in his pocket for the next phrase.
Only metal sounds and the body thrusts viably to taste the cold air
circulating on its tattered edge.


VARY AND VARIANCE

sit well – and sleep well,
‘til all these things stand still.
The existentialist needs somewhere to go.
incidental to the truth.  how depressing =
stay. and see if you like yourself.
cold are the winds of January.
grey, dull forces of winter, cleansing of the topical mind;
male and female appear to take away the body of summer.
You go – I’ll stay, adrift are crows, caw-ing in the twilight.


ONE BRIEF INSTANT OF GRACE

After some few weeks of silence, I long to show the contour of such meanings as could survive a hallway of elders and a nursing home; lunch.  The fittest apothegm means to be oneself elsewhere, and neglect to conclude what this does.

Leave the tray a while.

Why eat all the time


~John Chance, 1992

Note: The word "vibran" is Haitian creole for "stirring".
_____________________________________________

Worlds within worlds and poets under glass

Okay.



Santee Alley and Chinatown



two days rolled into one, with a passing glance at the tar pits.



We started at Santee Alley, which proved to be a great fun maze



like markets in Mexico





merged with a Hollywood





madhouse







a jumbled, swirling



temporary escape



from corporate



America





After the market we went to Chinatown, had lunch at Yang Chow's



and walked around



taking in the sights.



One morning, two worlds
then we went on to LACMA with hopes of also visiting the La Brea excavations going on next door.

Unfortunately, we just didn't have time to visit the tar pits. LACMA is just so huge. By the time we

were done, we were done but I did get a glimpse of the mammoth family at the pond. I've written about them here before. They haunt me. There they are, right on Wilshire Blvd, locked in a life or death drama. I know a guy here in Nevada who grew up in the La Brea area and remembers when giant fossilized skulls still protruded from the tarry sludge, mouths open, tusks thrust skyward, unchanged since the animals sank into the tar thousands of years ago. Now the bones, and so many more, have been excavated and this diorama stands in place as a memorial. The mother's feet are stuck in the gooey tar bottom of the pond and her mate and their baby, wild with fear and grief, watch helplessly from the shore as she tries to free herself. It's heartbreaking. The way the baby is stretching his trunk out to her, I can nearly hear his screams. It's as though the three of them have been struggling for the last 20,000 years to save her from an almost certain death.

We thought we might visit them and the excavation at Pit 91 after LACMA but as it turned out the museum was more than enough. M. Lee and I have been there before but still it was incredible and overwhelming. Along with everything else, the museum is currently showing Southern California Art of the 1960s and 70s and included were excepts from Semina, a "hand-printed, free-form, loose-leaf art and poetry journal privately published and distributed to a handful of friends and sympathizers" by Wallace Berman between 1955 to 1964, considered a "brilliant compendium of the most interesting artists and poets of its time."

The pages are displayed under a glass case. I looked for something from my uncle, not that I expected to find anything. Insanity and alcoholism scrambled him well before death finished the job. But I always check when there's anything about poets from the Beat era. I was just ready to move on and, to be honest, totally self-absorbed. Pointless. Why bother? Blah. Blah. Kathy found him. That's M. Lee's mom. She noticed that there was a poem by John Chance in the collection. She knew him in North Beach in the 50's, heard him read in the bars. Knew him from the scene. Mother of Beat Baby, don't ya know. She's a very cool lady. Bob Kaufman asked her to be godmother to one of his children, back in the day. In fact, it's her treat that we're in LA this week. She'd be in China now but her Chinese friend and traveling companion/interpreter had to opt out due to health reasons so the three of us came here instead. She found him ... Uncle John ... at the tar pit ... under glass.

The Security wouldn't let me photograph his poem. Museum rules. So I copied it and one more near by.

Talking Buddhism With My Lawyer


Every idea we took was carried to a point,
where it disappeared
into the infinity of possibility.

So there we sat.
There was something humorous
About charging out to the edge of the infinite

Only to find ourselves in that moment
Looking blankly across the table at one another
Locked in the same little room.

The ticker-tape clicking ignorant staccato
Outside the glass like a Zen Master.


~ John Chance


Excerpt from Pantopon Rose


Stay away from the Queen's Plaza, son ... Evil spot fuzz haunted by dicks scream for dope fiend lover ... too many lives ... heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia ... like burning lions ... fall on poor old lush workers scare her veins right down to the bone her skin pop a week or do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies ... So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor, beware ...


~ William S. Burroughs

RIP Uncle John.

[next]

A giant blast of sun beams

Benjamin Zephaniah. I love this guy! When asked what he would eat if he was in a desert with no food in sight except a cow, he said: "I'd find out what the cow was eating and join it."

He's a Brit who prefers to simply call to himself an oral poet but with him that covers a lot of ground. All I can say is please treat yourself to one of his videos.

I just discovered him while reading an article on vegetarian ethics. He became vegetarian at the age of 11 and vegan at 13: "I was disgusted by the taste and texture, and the thought of having flesh and blood against my teeth," he said. "Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay."

His words explode like the acorn.




vegetarian rap poetry music entertainment

Big names, bad poets

Billy Collins was US Poet Laureate from 2001–2003. He was replaced by Ted Kooser, a retired insurance executive. Both men are oozing academic credentials, adoring fans and accolades from all the right institutions. They are also bad poets. Their poems are safe like the dead organisms that inoculate and make people immune to the living ones. Naturally, its easy to take pot shots at famous people. It's a lazy man's sport, like fishing a stocked lake. And it's sad in a blowsy way to criticize the successful. After all, do they not set the bar? Have they not risen above us all precisely because they are more worthy? But the husk also floats to the surface and all too often famous poets poison the art. A few years ago Drunken Boat published a wonderful critique of Billy Collins. Paul Stephens wrote it. I just read it today; a forward from BeatBaby, aka Mr. Lee. I'm posting an excerpt from it here. Perhaps it will help to inspire some someone to risk entering the cold fire.

An Apology for Poetry, or, Why Bother With Billy Collins?

Billy Collins is to good poetry what Kenny G is to Charlie Parker; what sunset paintings at the mall are to Jackson Pollock; what Rod McKuen is to Walt Whitman; what Tori Spelling is to Lana Turner; what the burka is to lingerie; what the Backstreet Boys are to the Beatles; what George W. Bush is to the art of extemporaneous speech; what Osama bin Laden is to women’s liberation; what Dan Quayle is to spelling; Billy Collins is to poetry what the New Age/Mysticism section in the bookstore is to the Philosophy section, assuming that those two sections haven’t been conflated yet down at your local Barnes and Noble.

I could go on with list. But I don’t mean to suggest that Collins is kitsch, for though Collins may sometimes make gestures toward kitsch, he is very much working in a quasi-high culture mode, even if he occasionally tries to hide the fact. Many of his poems are supposedly witty responses to earlier famous poems (e.g. a poem titled "Dancing Towards Bethlehem").

Collins may not be a very learned poet, but he is not kitsch; Collins is much less interesting than kitsch–he is strictly banal, he wants us to know how uncomfortably banal poetry is, and he does a very good job of making us not want to read poetry any more. The banality of the title of his new Selected Poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room, pretty much says it all. The problem is that with his newfound prestige Collins is no longer sailing by himself."

The New York Times recently published a review of Collins's latest book, 'The Trouble With Poetry'. Their articles get archived quickly so I'm including it here in its entirety. It's also worth a read.

Charming Billy
a review by DAVID ORR / published in the NYT January 8, 2006


I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you

is how the first poem begins
in the new book by Billy Collins
called "The Trouble with Poetry."

It is a typical Collins beginning -
a good-natured wave
across the echoing gulf that stretches

between writer and reader,
as if to suggest
the poem itself exists

in that uncertain, cloud-strewn gap,
and we, as readers,
are very nearly poets ourselves,

even if we are unlikely
to receive recognition as such
in the form of a generous grant

from the Guggenheim Foundation,
which is not to say
we would turn one down, mind you.

Anyway, it is a tribute
to the former Poet Laureate
that he is able to make us believe,

despite our anxious response to poetry,
that we are participating
in each Billy Collins poem,

and that the humorous touches -
like calling a book of poetry
"The Trouble With Poetry" -

are a kind of knowing salute,
one writer to another.
It is a technical achievement

all too easy to underestimate,
and it involves a special sensitivity
to the nature of reading, of hearing,

which is perhaps the reason
so many Billy Collins poems
are about the process of poetry,

as when, in his poem "Workshop,"
he makes the poem itself
a history of its own unfolding,

a strategy that appears again here
in slightly altered form
as the opening to "The Introduction":

I don't think this next poem
needs any introduction -
it's best to let the work speak for itself,

a suave parody
of the nervous preambles
one hears at so many poetry readings,

and exactly the kind of beginning
that allows us to chuckle gently
as a convention is tweaked,

almost as we chuckle gently
in anticipation when we realize
that the book review we've been reading

is about to turn the corner,
and begin placing a writer's shortcomings
alongside his virtues,

by observing, for instance,
that Billy Collins too often relies
on the same blandly ironic tone

and the same conversational free verse,
loosely organized in tercets
or the occasional quatrain
when an extra line jogs onto the page,

or that his poems often begin well
and then spiral down
into unsurprising images

like exhausted birds
unable to stand for anything
beyond the simple fact of exhaustion,

or that, most important,
he is often humorous
without actually being funny,

a difference that depends largely
on a writer's willingness
to let his violent, comic sensibility

turn its knives on the reader,
on the poem,
and on poetry itself,

which may seem like an odd complaint,
given Collins's reputation
for teasing our stuffy poetic traditions.

But the teasing this writer does
is harmless, really, and contrary
to what some critics have suggested,

the problem with his work
is not that it is disrespectful,
but that it is not disrespectful enough;

it never cracks wise
to the teacher's face,
but meekly returns to its desk,

lending itself with disappointing ease
to the stale imagery
of teachers, desks and wisecracking.

In the end, what we need
from a poet with Collins's talent
is not a good-natured wave

from writer to reader,
or a literary joke, or a mild chuckle;
what we need is to be drawn

high into the poem's cloud-filled air
and allowed to fall
on rocks real enough to hurt.

Submitting poetry

I don't know why I have such a block against submitting poetry. I know it's "good enough". Total crap gets published. The big boogie fear of rejection is not my problem. Plus I promised myself, and a few pushy friends, that I'd start submitting after the writer's conference, as though that were a reason to wait. Now that's over I have no excuse. Plus I'm having neck and elbow surgery pretty soon and then I won't be able to do anything for a while. So got to get busy..........

....okay then....



Before I begin I have a confession to make. I'm a poet but I don't like writing or submitting, not poetry. Not anything. Clearly I prefer images. I can't seem to do a post without including at least one. Take these, for example. They're from another day I intended to write. I went to Comma Coffee for a change of scene but instead of writing, I photographed the place again. June has a flare, you have to admit. The whole place reeks of ambiance even if it is across the street from the Nevada State Senate.

Okay. I'll get busy now. I don't know why I have to write about it???

Oh. one more thing. Never mind. Why do I do this to myself?

Never mind.

Until next year

Whew! It's over. The Juniper Creek conference was wonderful, but it was a lot of intensity crammed into one tiny little weekend. It's Tuesday and I still feel like I'm slogging back across mud flats after being swept out by a huge wave.



It was great seeing people I met last year. Nice meeting new people. I learned a few things. I got some good feedback, good direction.
Gayle Brandeis was especially helpful. Thanks again, Gayle. Plus we sold enough copies of Ash Canyon Review to pay for the next two issues! Also, I picked up several new poetry books and journals: Hard Night by Christian Wiman, The Dumbbell Nebula by Steve Kowit, a couple of issues of The Sierra Nevada College Review, three issues of Caveat Lector, and a copy of Quercus Review. I've scattered them around the various places I sit for quiet and a cup of coffee. I've got some good summer reading ahead of me.

The best part of the conference for me however, was that my daughter attended it. I don't mind saying that, besides being a completely cool person, she is a wonderful writer. Contrary to popular opinion, moms are not disqualified from objectively knowing things like that! It was so incredible being there together as writers, friends and mom and daughter. It really doesn't get any better than that!

War

Nothing, not even victory
will erase the terrible hole of blood:
nothing, neither the sea, nor the passing
of sand and time, nor the geranium burning
over the grave.

~ Pablo Neruda

Valentine for the Strange

I rather hate doing a blog. It draws me into revealing more about myself than I'm comfortable with. Why not stop, you might ask but I can't give you a satisfactory answer so I won't even try. That said, I want to share part of the lovely card LP made me for Valentine's day. He included what is now my new, favorite love poem and Valentine image. I'm sorry but I don't know who the artist is. I'd love to see more of their work. It's wonderful. The poem was written by Stephen Crane. He is best known for his novel, "Red Badge of Courage", but he also excelled at the short story and was a fine poet. Unfortunately he died young, 29 (1871-1900), leaving years of writing undone. His poetry was so unusual for the time that he referred to them as lines rather than poems. I call this one of my favorite poems of all time.

In the Desert

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter – bitter," he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

- Stephen Crane

Street sign

Street sign

I'm the one wearing the hoodie.

Ash Canyon Poets

Okay, I just uploaded the website for Ash Canyon. It's not done but check it out anyway. Cowee loves it. He thinks I'm some kind of magician. Actually, he said "witch" but I don't care for that word. So many violent crimes have been committed against people, because someone accused them of being a  witch or pagan.

It's funny how delighted Bill is. I down play it but, actually, I enjoy his reaction. I'm excited too, and happy to do it. I owe a lot to Ash Canyon. Not only are they fun to hang out with, because of them I've written several new poems. I also set up a couple of blogs for Ash Canyon, but haven't done anything with them yet. I am swamped.

-----------------------------------------------

Postscript

Bill Cowee died of heart failure on October 16, 2009. We will always, always miss him. 
Obituary, Reno Gazette Journal

Bill Cowee
Comma Coffee garden
Carson City, Nevada
photo: Asha

 


Do Not Resuscitate


We must record the wishes
of our passing
the Advanced Directive,
not the killing of slaves
with their baskets of wheat and dates,
but absence of feeding tubes

or hand pumping our breasts.
Only the sipping of drugs
to ease the journey.
Let me go
into the great lake,
into my own time, my soul
wrapped in its swaddling
with the spices of my life.
My body like a reed
of its own papyrus
ink still wet
with the blessing
of having written.

~Bill Cowee, Carson City, Nevada 2009

-----------------------------------------------

The Ash Canyon website is currently on indefinite hiatus but the group continues. It currently meets from 7-9 PM on the third Friday of the month at the "The Bric" building located at 108 Proctor Street in Carson City, Nevada. map

More details about Ash Canyon Poets meetings.
Some of my own poetry can be found at AnnaSadhorse.