Snow, & Poems

Poem for the day, which was inspired by Tom who is skiing and memories of Lindsey and Darby and growing up in the woods. In honor of the snow which 18 hours later is still REALLY coming down, & my deep great desire to go sledding with red cheeks and smiley open fun. With the exception of being 16, with Briana and I all punkrocked, waiting on Larry and Scott and Lindsey to get there and being so, soo sweetly stoned, this is definitely the best snow day I have ever known

HILLS

There were power lines where I grew up:
hills.

At the end of the street behind the cedar trees
and calf-level thickets of clover and thorns.

We went there in our shorts and short-sleeves
took the back-way around through the woods
down to where Gumbottom Creek bled out.
Brave days we would make what otherwise
was a winter climb.
The muscle movement of puberty leg flexors
and misery of sweat, the tripped over grass-clusters
and rotation of sky against top of hill-land and also
breath: in and out in and out, up and down.

I really don’t remember mosquitoes
puckering our arms & later, in the mildew spring

when the earth was wet
and the thicket mats flat
from the rails of our sleds

we would lay our blankets down, and the sun still felt
damp, and cold on our skin

On a creative witchy mind

I dont know, this might be hard to relate to, but a friend of mine told me once that I am a spiritual archivist not just my own but for all of our friends. I was thinking of this tonight when I uploaded some pics onto my computer: 150 shots from Thanksgiving through this weekend. I almost never, ever wait that long between events to unload shots, but life has been hectic and I am walking along inside of it, tired but not weary, just moment to moment and wow have my moments been full.

And I do, I do: I keep track of the cycles of my self, and everyone around me. I dont just mentally acknowledge things, I mean I have a literal requiem storehouse on those that I count as tribe members, close friends and Knectors to my soul. I can't articulate this circuit board that goes on, but I am always filtering in the details, hearing their stories, processing their tales, then processing back for them the current myth or tide they are riding. I dont even realize it it's just what I do. I mark passings, and everyone's peaks and tides, by various means of traditional and non-traditional poles. Like today, the new moon, most powerfull tide passing time of year. All over the place people I know are witnessing: they are starting brand new goals; or taking pause; or hitting pinnacles in current circumstances; this is how we do, how we rise, how we flow, how we pass, how we current ever so swiftly or softly along. Somehow in my head I always easily see others big pictures for how it all easily is weaving together.

I guess what got me thinking about this was uploading these pics tonight, in that it'd been so long since I'd done so. I immediately caught myself nodding: ahhh yes, a quickening just occurred, I went through three whole weeks of straight archiving rather than also organizing and cataloging. My lens backed up and resharpened: in that time the poetry and magic and words have been flowing through me like mad. I've even been penpal-ing with someone the whole time: all of it, all those examples of capturing what is happening all around. A quickening, a quickening of the tide.

And the wind here, when it gets blowing, has been blowing like crazy just like last year on the last day of the calendar year. Winds so high the Choptank River and Elliot Bay both looked like the ocean at high tide.

Dont think it's a joke the old saying winds of change. Folk lore is some of the wisest medicine we have, yes? Everything at all times around us always is eternal reality of creative present moment. Our fates whisper in the wind sure as on the radio or in the trees.

Wild whipping winds tonight on the Eastern Shore.

Winter Solstice is coming: get it guys? Monday it all peaks, right before our closed--or if you're brave and learning to fight for it--at least half-opened eyes... What changes will come what changes are already half on their way?

Poetry vs poetry and First thought, best thought

Ever since the little river started or since I surrendered anyhow and agreed to jump in I haven't been sleeping well. As alluded to before, that can trip me out cuz for someone such as me who has psycho-mania in her catalogue not sleeping can be a dangerous thing. But it's not, not now, and that is the cool thing--I am awake at 4, or 2, or not sleeping at all--or only for two hours or so this week when I get home from what all week were 12 hour days and I'm like whatever, I'm going with it. It's like Bobby Ray the shaman said once years ago, it's only your fear that will keep you sick...

Anyhow since for me writing is Queen and blogging has become part of my practice, part of the discipline of my smithing away at this craft--in very much the first thought best thought style or what I've taken to calling spontaneous download--I thought I better jump on here and give some time to my practice. And then there's the act of writing poetry, different as I explained to a new writer friend just yesterday or no that was two days ago by now, than Poetry capital P which to me is an ethic, a tribe, or value--a state of not just being touched by the madness but alluring and living in it all the same: the saying of the Holy Amen. But as a wordsmith, as a practitioner of art actually writing poetry is different than say the practice of just first thought best thought, and also different than memoir writing. It includes it, but becomes too a strange cohesion of like, sitting in my boat on the river but keeping too a mild hand at all times on the oar. But not using it for paddling, more as like a rutter, that with the slightest touch does indeed effect the trajectory of surface gliding, but only in as much as a pebble might effect a ripple, and the water and the boat--the whole experience of the trip ultimately is of the same...

I wrote poems yesterday so that is why I am thinking so to speak aloud. No, that was two days ago--in the morning, five good poems that remind me a lot of that November in 03 when I was in my little room off my studio apartment on Mt.Royal. The poems and momentum that started my litmag Cantalma and also was the beginning of Fishing Rock.

Ahhh, hello little river. You fucking ho! Careful what you wish for sometimes? I wouldn't change it tho, wouldn't change it at all not even in exchange for the world...

Mike Cades: A Decade of Music

My buddy Mike and I met in college.  He's a musician. We met in college, he was one of a handful of folks whose intellectualism marvelled and intimidated me, and later, whose artistic sense inspired and provoked me.

Mike and I worked together this summer on some creative ideas that may or may not manifest in time to come. In the meantime, he started this super cool project that I think all music lovers need to check out. A Decade of Music is Mike's blog, and invitation to anyone to create(from his first blogpost)a mix of music created from 2000 - 2009 that influenced you as an artist, if you're an artist, or that you just loved the fuck out of, if you're a geologist or something awesome like that. It should be in chronological order but from your perspective (ie. If you suddenly discovered Kid A in 2008, you should place is thusly in the mix, as opposed to placing in the year it was released, whenever that was... everyone knows Radiohead is a pretty silly band without much of a future).

Totally, totally check this blog out. Especially if you're a music-lover, or even just a mildly music-interested geologist or something.

Now look, I love this. What's always cracked me up about that crew from college is how compared to them I came ass-end in to things, foraging the world a bit before college and only coming in to myself, my intellectualism and creativity, towards the end. It's my identity as an intellectual and artist that I've always struggled with, that I've spent the years of college, and after, trying to integrate. The things of the world outside always came easy to me, natural. These pals, their smarts came easy and were never questioned. It was the world that, post-college, challenged them to enlist their creativity in order to associate. So of course their music is smart, eclectic, emotional, hugely ranging.

For facebook I recently put together a list of artists that inspired and changed me through out my teens. For the better part of the 2000's I wasn't taking much new music in. Mike's blog made me realize my illiteracy in this area--the last decade of music. It delights me to see the variety on his blog, makes me realize the great accessibility of the Internet and what this era has done for art. At first I was quick to jump on board with the claim that the great milieu of info and variety out there really only made for a flood of crap, no way to find the great stuff. But I realize now that new standards are cut precisely when a playing field gets leveled.
I think people talented as Mike are the ones who will cut those new prototypes.

Decademix.blogspot.com

Shampoo My Planet & call me X

You know, it's late and I put in over 10 hours today and have to be back it at 8 tmrw. But I've been up blog rolling and living in the cyber dream of future days when I have my little shack & it's all tribe and art and self-education and off the books schooling of new generations of tribe and calling and new fearless ethics and Poetry as Real Work and so on and yea, it's late, and this little river, and, well you know...I could go on and on.

Anyway. Serendipity!? I got in to all this meat on Friday in my memoir, wrote for 5 and a half hours at the Panera, then took a break for dinner and convo for about an hour and a half, then got back to it, writing til well past midnite. I was writing a lot about the 90's, riot grl, coming up, tribes, death, the duende, imagnation and it's doomed demise.

Read this post! Yes! Not so much for the Pumpkins myself, but damned if Friday I didn't spend an hour in urging longing wistfullness over the first Lolla, & Janes Addiction, 1991....

Writerly Things, Reflections: Eddie's Place, Crofton & Back in the Day

This man I loved greatly died in the winter when I was 19, about to be 20. It was January, something like the 18th or 19th when he went. I found out on Thanksgiving only two months before, his son Little Dave told tell me Kel, dad's got cancer. I was standing in the basement at mom's getting ready to leave for some kind of impromptu day after Turkey Day family thing like bowling or whatever somewhere in the county with one of the aunts or uncles and cousins. Little Dave showed up, walked down in to the basement with the weirdest smile on his face. You always remember where you are the moment news like that hits.

Eddie was Little Dave's dad, and he owned the pizza shop I grew up working in. The whole time my dad was living in Cali, and my mom and I were fighting like blood and daggers, and my dad and I not speaking unless we were hating and yelling, Ed was a Pop to me. Teasing me, hugging and smiling and also yelling and scaring the shiz out of us and keeping me right, best he could for us anyhow, keeping his look out.

A month later it was Christmas, I was at the community college, had just started waiting tables at a fancypants joint in downtown Annapolis cuz the GM from Jersey came down and fired me from Applebee's, which is what happens when you cuss out a customer. It was before gentrification and the uptown yuppy parts of Naptown weren't there yet, same like Baltimore and the Harbourside condos and three and four star restaurants--none of that was there, just projects and ghettos and old abandoned warehouses no "revitalization," yet.

I was trying to not touch drugs anymore because two things happened when I picked up: I was likely to spin out and go a little crazy, and simultaneously once I started I could not stop smoking or sniffing or popping or whatever else it was I had to do to keep using once I started, no matter what the hell was going on with my body and mind. So it was days before Christmas and I went to Eddie's house, with a poinsettia for him and a letter mapping it all out. What he meant to me.

It was the last time I ever saw him. When I left I smoked a joint and circled the Crofton Parkway, and all the Christmas lights clean and glowing, and how could all that be going on normal, all these everylive's, and Eddie's gonna be dead. My mind mindlessly looping I drove the backroads Underwood to St. Stevens and on and on and back and back and Eddie was gonna die you know when the cancer's got someone like that you can just tell and lemmee tell you, I was young still, and fucked up. About three weeks or so later I pulled in to the parking lot of the restaurant, Eddie's Place, for a Sat night shift because I'd volunteered to take shifts again when he got sick. And one of the teens that worked the kitchen like I did when I started a sub girl came running out and said, Did you hear? Eddie's dead.

I was mad at her because she didn't know him like I did and how could you just drop the news like this out here in the parking lot under the grey eyeless sky? She hadn't been there all those years. Soon Maura was there and Mark and I think maybe even Cuddy and Kristen, too, then Billy came up, and we all cried a lot and didn't know what to say it just all happened so quick, then Little Dave called me, and asked me to give a eulogy on behalf of all us, Ed's restaurant kids.

The day of the funeral, or memorial service which is more what it was, I had to miss the first day of my first creative writing class, ever. When I showed up on the second day my heart was locked heavy with grief and little did I know, my Prof Susan, soon to be my first writing mentor, assigned to me a key and essentially said, go ahead, unlock. Unload. We had to turn in a memoir at the end of the semester, an autobiography, responsible for a large part of our grade. The first page of mine was Ed's eulogy.

What stands most out to me that spring was this compelling energy, this literal river that felt real and loving and natural as gold and that I could feel, all the time, like a channel just moving along through me. All I had to do, my only job, was to show up in my boat and then be willing to go. I didn't even need an oar in hand.

I wrote like I'd never wrote before, every afternoon, sometimes starting at 11 in the morning when class got out and not stopping until well after mom had gone to bed. I wrote, and wrote and wrote. It was the easiest, and also hardest thing--when it got to the pain-parts, like wringing an already rung dishtowel sometimes--that I'd ever done. And it was easy, because it was so natural. I just showed up in my boat, like I said, and off I went.

Later, Susan wrote a recommendation letter to Washington College for me, and helped me prepare a selection of writing samples. By the fall of that year I'd moved to Chestertown--hellooooo Eastern Shore, and life of Acadamy, and Institution, again--and then well you know...Here I am and So it goes, so it goes....

That was 11 years ago and all I've ever wanted was that river again. A huge part of the power of that river is merely trust. Trusting the river, but you can only do this if you're strong enough to trust yourself, and your boat, too.

In Chestertown I got sober, and lost a lot of the gleam of who I am. The radical starry-eyed sassy warrior grl I'd always been. I let her go with sobriety because, like the first line of Ed's eulogy says, My name is Kelly, though most you of may know me as that crazy girl from Eddie's Place and funny as this was, it was also true. There's always been a stigma for me of crazy associated to life prior to getting clean because of, well, because of the plain and straight experiences of literally and totally losing my mind. Drug related psychosis and figuring out if it really was cuz I was mentally ill, and the long hard battle all that was back then.

Bit by bit, year by year, I've tried to rectify it. Time and distance and maturity account for a lot.

The Duende is scary because death and crazy are scary. And it is painful, because only the artist knows so intimately the mid-wifing required of creative growth. To have to confront these, to have to be willing to confront it if you want to be brave enough and strong enough to do the work you secretly think you're capable of. And is anything really worth that hurt?

This morning, I was lying in bed and thinking about trust. I thought, you lived like this once, in 98, and again in 02 for that teeny little bit of time til you shut it down becasue of shame. And then, why fight it, this pacing coursing energy you actually feel growing and growing these last weeks, why fight who you are? I started to get up, to come write more on my novel, and then my room, my living room with my bed in the corner so that my bedroom could actually be my writing space, stilled. I stilled, in a moment of discovery which I guess is just acceptance, again, on yet a deeper level.

Acceptance of self.

The gold channel, the river, there it was. There I was, in my boat, on its shore. A small little click of peace happened, or not a click, just more like a feather floating softly to land even less than breathlessly, on the ground. A quiet soft sweet motion of getting my feet wet. Of stepping in.

My river is back. My gold channel is here again, refound.

I've keep looking at my hands and I can't keep from crying these wonderful hot tears all morning long.

On Poems, & the Writing Nuts

My new pal Mike, this writer-buddy from here in Easton and self-proclaimed lover of running (Mike I had to edit that bc instead of writing running I originally wrote "funning"!), long-boarding and his kids and fam, who also is re-discovering his voice and source-creativity-power in motion of song and poetry and light, just wrote this post about the first poet that ever turned him on.

Sandburg. It's a great post read it. The poem he posted is a dream all charge charge gogogo.

Who was yours?

For me it was Emerson, tho, & as I should of paid attention to all the way back then, it was his prose/ethics that first stood out:

from Nature
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches....

I remember, sure as anything, the moment, dropping on to my desk my own handwrote wilted journal of softback poems with a soft thwush of its pages as it landed because my teacher, who had a funny long name I no longer remember, mentioned the Transcendental Eye. Holy hell I thought in wonder and looked at her dazed, mystical, like she'd just woken me from a dream and here I am surprised as I was to find that I was in reality. I never did my homework it was my junior year so her lesson was all new to me, my first AP class and mostly I was consumed with having gotten arrested over the weekend bc one of the upperclassmen girls in the class had ratted on me at the party after I left blowin up my spot. Yea it was me that left the seen of that hit and run. (It was a parked, empty car that I took the bumper off of, not some poor shmoe left to wail in the street...)

Here, here! this teacher telling about the Universalism's and Transcendentalism and for the first time, here, here is some work that gets my attention, here are some writers I can get my hands on and I want you to know I read him, and Thoreau that whole afternoon in the back of the locker room and later, instead of religion class with Ms. Bo.

Next of course it was Ginsberg and the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...which would come to me and come to me later as I taught in the jail and needed to show these young street savy black men how fierce, how true, how real Poetry could get it on. I still remember the ache and sizzle reading it aloud in that cold, dark and stale windowless room. The eyes and nods and caught breath, the looks on all their faces....

It was Snyder that helped me cross the threshold, tho. Now we're in college, I am clean, my brain for the first time harnessing and focusing and making real connections through and through. The Bath. I wrote a 10-page paper on it in three hours flat and it was the only A+ I ever got with not one mark or yea, but...feedback. It blew my mind, and my prof's, too. Read it. Read it out loud like Mooney taught me to do. Pay good attention to the comas, the indents, the natural pauses until the rhythm gets in to you, melds with you, the poem and you are it and become you, and bigger than you, too.

In other writerly news, I want you also to stop by Erika's post today for a little bit of communion. God, this girl. I totally feel her, remember nodding out behind the cash register at Play It Again Sam's my senior year of college because I was working on my first and only fiction novel and was up all night long three, four nights, whole weeks in a row. Coffee infusions and lots of cigarettes. Sitting up out of dead drenched sleep with lines charging through me head. I cant wait to see where she ends up....

Happy weekend, friends. It's sunny out here on the ol EC, again! O sunshine my true and hope-full friend.

Dear Erika,

So this Duende thing. I bought this book, over a year ago, Garcia Lorca's In Search of Duende, because it's eyes turned on me in the aisle at the Barnes & Noble and followed me like one of those creepy antique portrait's, and was whispering, and so finally I said yes yes I see you and took it home. And tried once, twice, over again and to no avail. Then one day the other week on he is, on it turns and I soup him up like we were made from the same broth, and in moments all these other ideas collide and the secret cave door opens and like that, in I go. Lorca's Duende, same as Gilbert's (or the Roman's) Genie. Invoking of presence, and or descent-ion of presence. How Hem came to you that night in the dream.

Today I went walking on my break in the sunshine, I was supposed to meet Jason my work buddy for a hike but we had to cancel because of, well, work. So I stole an hour and walked in the sun and ended up blocks away at the Library. I dont have a library card and had no mail on me with my new address and my ID is old, too (they make it hard to use the free library) so I just sat in the back of the poetry aisle where the french section was and read Baudelaire. And guess what? Here it is again, the Genie, the Duende, the sweeping power. O imagination, in-road to the magic graces. But he calls it Guignon, "the evil spirit of misfortune & disaster!" And true, for him, then--to follow such Zest, to answer the call did bring him all matters of outcast status and leveling of home life and reputation.

Aaaa-I've been there.

What would Liz Gilbert have to say of that?

I feel lost out here grl, and at once so so at home. Afloat on this ocean and aloft on clouds I am spinning and the gold mists I am using to spin with are my own and yet a grace I am not able to summon but gifted at this time with which to use, able to evaporate or hydrate at my very touch. But if I focus on it, too much, like the Tao, it is gone. It is odd, this sensation of being alone, and home. On my own. What Jazmine my college roommate and first yogi I ever knew and I meant when we came up with Woman, Ascending. It's just how I knew it would be, so natural there are no words when it just comes as easy as this is, and at once so odd--like the sense of lucid dreaming, that moment, upon recognition, that you are dreaming, that sheer moment of wonder doubled, heightened, by the awareness of power. Responsibility. That surge sense of constantly being on the widening edge and not having control but just widening it with acceptance, and a smile...

I miss the men. My best friend who knew me better than anyone, and the other the best friend who compelled me more than anyone. And yet even that too has neutralized, is part of the common background that simply adds to the freshness of my ever increasing day by days. It's all so new, but yes, as I knew it would be. But it adds a strangeness to my status--a newness I've never before encountered. My creativity grows and as it, my intellectualism. New friends and men turn up, but I dont want to give away this new thing that I am finally, for me, just getting to own. My belief and faith returns to myself in a way I haven't before known, at least not since I put academy down in the back of Mrs. Scotts class all those years ago and instead picked up pencil, page and Poetry! When she favored the boys--remember--her love of Dominic and Matt Jerzyk? When she took me aside once, and, under her breath, told me you have a 98, the highest grade in here right now, do you know what that means? It was pre-SAT time and everyone was starting to talk about College and where they wanted to go.

I did know what it meant, but I pretended I didn't care.

I do! I do now! I do, again. Like I did the last time we last exchanged notes in class. 7th grade Ms. Fouse, underneath our desks those musty yellow basement rooms of Arthur Slade. Hormones boxer shirts and Brian Dietz!? The same year I started smoking and stealing wine coolers and booze. How weird it is for it all to come back round again, and for the themes all to be the same?

And that is the point of this letter, these Musings. This recap at the end of the NaNoWriMo thing. I Have So Many Threads. So many with which I want to weave. Letting the quantity come out rather than focus on the quality--well most of it was just shit. But little golden seeds ready to grow, too, in all that detritus! So many threads all coming out of, all re-creating, this great tapestry of me. So many threads I dont know which way to go and it is overwhelming and I miss you, who keeps me tethered and right. Riot Grrrl & Wise Women Ways, the instinct injured feminine self and epidemic of wounded youth as result=deadened imagination. The death! Death, of the Duende, of the Art, the Call. A new Ethics of fearlessness, like Liz Gilbert says. Reliance on the Genie. Faith in it All. Not Kicking against the Goades, as is my interpretation of the condition of Baudelaire's Guignon, but full-bodied acceptance. What, and you'll love this, Ms. Faback (sp?!) taught on my first day of religion in the third grade. That Amen means simply, to say YES.

Looking forward to our next exchange,
Happy Holidays and gratefullness to you,

xoxoo
k

I discovered TedTalks indirectly a few weeks ago when Erika sent me this link, and directly a week later at the first writing gathering I went to here in Easton.

This is so fabulous, a talk that really encompesses so many of the late night talks I've had with folks like Walsh or KRuss or Brooks. The idea of the Duende is in here, and of Ego and Narcissism, of Genius and The Impulse and The Calling and The Tribe, and the shadow and its various instincts and results...all those fabulous things that compel me when the sun goes low and the dark time is here....And Poetry!! Listen to 10:18 on about Ruth Stone the poet! Holy hell o sacred impulse. Get a cup of coffee or glass of wine and settle in.