Boom-shaka-laka he says, and turns, keeps talking, good choice--more a mutter under his voice. He is responding to my breakfast sandwich order. The woman next to him with the hair and eyes we would've called hipster ten years ago but is just Youth now is wringing her body, a posture you have to be near enough her to feel or sense rather than see. Squirming. Trying to contain her energy. We used to call it wilen--trying to hold that feeling in. They are jolly, inside-skin-sweating, barista-caffeinated in that contagious way that saturates me so completely I have to sit down and write about it.
To write, to just say: I witness, I see. And also I guess, for some of us anyway: Yes, I also have been…
...A barista, a million 5 am mornings the slim shiver ice slap to the face brutal as breath in the morning coming in from the Bay. Get the lights on and newspapers out for the Pines retiree locals who'll be here by 8. Espresso grounds airborne or on your hands actually infuse your skin, that high-wired trigger volt there even if you don't drink, gotta go gotta go gotta move keeping going what to do nowwww. Brown-eyed hippie boy and his broad shoulder townie friends, Natalie's Comfort Food blueberry muffin smells, how smells actually fog your glasses, December mornings walking in to Play it Again Sam's, start the slow drip 7am, senioritus and early-caffeinated-sobriety thirteen years ago in my college town.
I have been…
...I leave the rehab early this morning. Two clients I used to work with, back. One strung out again, one almost half a year clean. The same jittery barista-body wringing-energy in them. One from tweak, one from the joy, the life force, the vitality that is wordless but throttles through you in a rush of yes I can.
Hope is a funny thing, its wavers and disappearing acts, its suddens rushes and returns.
There are so many people in this coffee shop that the line doubles itself in front of the door. Of all the things I have been hope is the most important of them all. Boom-shaka-laka guy never doesn't use his barista high to connect with me, and every other customer, to give them a smile. I remember that. Each moment, which could be…an act of love.
In most moments, a choice. In a million different things. HOPE--which most finally is a thing to be...
Showing posts with label the real work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the real work. Show all posts
December 4, 2014
November 1, 2014
The Vintage Series.
You guys, I'm back. YES, the Impulse Itself is vibing high and vital! Screaming surging pulsing pressing to get out and witnessed, or at least not to just stay bubbling under the surface any longer.
Can a blog that started only six years ago be called vintage? No haha and I am alright by that bc I dowhatiwant and also, yes of course it can--bc in this high-wire frame of techno overdrive time blogging is as yesterday as MySpace so holllaaaa and whatev. Who's gonna stick with what feels good anyway?
Ya. Def this girl.
So for two years I worked out my esoteric witchy wisdom stuff over on Wild Women Wisdom. I'm really hella proud of that project and how it informed me as a tool through which I could be self-taught. That whole time, (and still) I was getting fed from the bottom on up by my education in depth-influenced counseling psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. For the past several months I have been behind the scenes, relying on the old persona of KadadaB to work it out for me as I begin to coalese the old with the new in order to focus actively on what will yet be! So STOKED!
Wild Women Wisdom is slowly changing into the hub of my women's coaching practice. I am focusing on self-empowerment, whole-bodied practical day to day meeting of yourself where you're at and learning to love and live your self, through whatever responsibilities and roles are alive and real in your life as a woman. I am happy to work with men too! I will also specialize in The Women's Work, or the Menstrual Mysteries, which is helping women to embody their personal tides until they are no longer mysteries! A life's work, for sure…I offer Skype sessions right now, can see clients in an office space in San Juan Capistrano, and (especially for more ritual or sacred-based work) in my home.
Ultimately--and here's the exciting stuff to me! The seeds of what yet will be! Woot woot--I will be incorporating--ever so slowly, my goal of doing the Social aspect of Permaculture work. SoCIal Perm. I'll be using Wild Women Wisdom to mostly work that out but you know there's no separating soul--so stay tuned on here to learn--WITH ME!!--more about what I mean by that. We'll learn together, since that's always how I do this jam.
The Impulse Vintage Series will be alive-- again! Horay. Bc sure as I am living I need a place to express all the minute expressions of the holy mundane coming through me and that I'm out there relating to each day. In this way, I re-Christen this blog, at the season of Samhain, holy celebratory tide of reverence for the dead. From which comes all new life.
To Poetry, as a way of being, living, seeing. Getting it all down~ holy act of self-creation. Amen Amen Amen.
I love you guys! Play on~
Can a blog that started only six years ago be called vintage? No haha and I am alright by that bc I dowhatiwant and also, yes of course it can--bc in this high-wire frame of techno overdrive time blogging is as yesterday as MySpace so holllaaaa and whatev. Who's gonna stick with what feels good anyway?
Ya. Def this girl.
So for two years I worked out my esoteric witchy wisdom stuff over on Wild Women Wisdom. I'm really hella proud of that project and how it informed me as a tool through which I could be self-taught. That whole time, (and still) I was getting fed from the bottom on up by my education in depth-influenced counseling psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. For the past several months I have been behind the scenes, relying on the old persona of KadadaB to work it out for me as I begin to coalese the old with the new in order to focus actively on what will yet be! So STOKED!
Wild Women Wisdom is slowly changing into the hub of my women's coaching practice. I am focusing on self-empowerment, whole-bodied practical day to day meeting of yourself where you're at and learning to love and live your self, through whatever responsibilities and roles are alive and real in your life as a woman. I am happy to work with men too! I will also specialize in The Women's Work, or the Menstrual Mysteries, which is helping women to embody their personal tides until they are no longer mysteries! A life's work, for sure…I offer Skype sessions right now, can see clients in an office space in San Juan Capistrano, and (especially for more ritual or sacred-based work) in my home.
Ultimately--and here's the exciting stuff to me! The seeds of what yet will be! Woot woot--I will be incorporating--ever so slowly, my goal of doing the Social aspect of Permaculture work. SoCIal Perm. I'll be using Wild Women Wisdom to mostly work that out but you know there's no separating soul--so stay tuned on here to learn--WITH ME!!--more about what I mean by that. We'll learn together, since that's always how I do this jam.
The Impulse Vintage Series will be alive-- again! Horay. Bc sure as I am living I need a place to express all the minute expressions of the holy mundane coming through me and that I'm out there relating to each day. In this way, I re-Christen this blog, at the season of Samhain, holy celebratory tide of reverence for the dead. From which comes all new life.
To Poetry, as a way of being, living, seeing. Getting it all down~ holy act of self-creation. Amen Amen Amen.
I love you guys! Play on~
January 3, 2011
The Authentic Life. Begin Again.
The authentic self is the soul made visible. ~Sarah ban Breathnach
Upside down the view is touching and real as anything going on when my feet are on the ground, in fact, life felt most open, most real, most expansive and in touch with what my insides crave from that exact perspective. I was naked as the day is perennial, floating inside the earth in hotspring mineral water that came from deep inside the belly of the land. My head was leaned way back, resting on a rock, staring up at moss then roots then the trees arched over me then beyond. And me close as I could be to deep, deep under the Cascade Mountains, Northern Oregon, USA.
My friend and wise woman Gretchen had her buddy pick me up in Portland and drive me the three hours to her and the cozy room in her cottage on the coast. Gretchen lent me an old beater pickup and for three weeks I went where the wind wanted to take me. I spent a lot of time with her, my wise woman friend, and with Paul my brother in rebel-peace-making who I met working in a roadhouse steak joint on the Oregon Coast in 05, and also with Beth, my friend with the Lungta-Spirit and Anusara-calling.
I called my mom crying after the first week, saying how much I had ached to be there with people who I intrinsically considered my tribe, how very much alive and like myself I finally felt again. Beth and I floated in those hotsprings and slept in the cold, pointed night in Paul's tent in the lush evergreen woods. We hiked the coast range and communed deep with the well of wise woman wisdom which is found easily and naturally within when we take the time to still, and listen. And what I told them, Beth and Paul, again and again when they asked what was next for me was that I was giving my spirit all the time it needed to answer that question.
No time-frame, is what I said.
I had weddings and family obligations back at home, and a job waiting, and a room at the beach.
This morning, in that very same room, I thought a lot about the past year and about the importance, the commitment, of always returning back to our selves. This is the wild woman wisdom, the intrinsic trust in one's own connection within. I was 21 when my aunt gave me the daily meditation book Simple Abundance, and it is that book that I credit for Confirmation. Confirming the yearning. The natural and legitimate siren ring from inside myself that felt like propulsion and being stuck at once that was pressing me towards hand-creating a life that was meaningful, and real, to me. And that life has always begun first with settling in to find "me". I handed that book over to a young wise-woman to be this week, knowing well that it landed in the right hands. And in the mean time, I returned to my quiet space today, answerless still, but with a clear knowing sense from cultivating that connection: My next move harmonious to my spirit is soon to present it self, so long as I continue a day at a time to show up to me. To show up and begin again after for example 8 days of living out of my car through the tangled holidays stretched along the Baltimore-Annapolis corridor, to be willing to sit back down and begin again.
December 22, 2010
Tribute. Los Que Saben.
Last night Brooks and I were on the phone talking process and art and inspiration for at least two and a half hours.
He quit his job the day after I did in March, we both worked in the same office and the idea was we were both moving to the city to follow our dreams. He is doing amazingly well, is the host beginning tonight of the Balitmore Song Writers open mic in Fells and this is among at least four or five other big deal things. When we used to work in cubicles across from one another every week we would talk high-energy, deeply riveting "Narnia" talk (Narnia a reference he came off the cuff with last night, talking about relationships with "normal", un-arty people. We need them, he said, "to help pull the ropes and lead us out of Narnia.") I used to grab him and yank him towards Narnia--literally take him hand and run us out the back door of the employment agency and through the hard parking lot in the cold light of the sun. I'd make us walk on a patch of grass-slanted hill, the only section in that area of Easton not paved. Eventually he caught on and would do the same to or for me. Yank me out the door when my head needed a check and take me out for duende talk, food and sun. Our enthusiasm, talking Campbell's bliss-talk and serendipity and inspiration--constantly quoting philosophers or poets or musicians musicians musicians--was unstoppable.
I've tried not to think about it at all and the proof of that fact is it didn't even come up in conversation last night, but my laptop is down and it is killing me. The hardest part of not having it is staring me down this morning--all scowling face and fang-toothed today. And that's going on the road. Ahead of me is lots of uncharted time, 6 days in fact of road trip, that would normally be cleaved in to long swaths at various coffee shops between Annapolis and Baltimore working on my novel and blogging and so forth. The thought of being without that sustenance is making my stomach turn. The other thing about not having my laptop is not being able to write poetry, too, which I am used to doing at least once a week propped up in bed on a lounge of pillows in the most comfortable place in my world, letting the words drop and flow and come and come.
This all happened in Memphis the week before last when I went to visit Sean. He has this intercom thing that runs radio stations all through the house and we listened to Christmas music from the moment my family stepped through the door. So I was in my guest room after a shower and turned on my laptop and turned off the intercom and typed in the address for Pandora. I'm all for being festive but I needed a break and the myth is always upon me these days, the creative life flourishing there beneath the surface at all times and I believe I need to nurture it much as I can, I believe this can be done through music and reading poems and being present in the still cold winter air and also by being brave. There were ads that kept popping up on my computer though, and a commercial for Wal-mart that wasn't even connected to a pop-up but that wouldn't turn off. Next just like that my adrenaline was already going and my head full of panic and memories of the late nineties and the computer at mom's infested with spyware. I quick turned my laptop off and pretended it wasn't happening and I numbed the part of me that needs that nurturing same as it needs air.
A few days later Justin from work texted me through trying to remove it on my own. It didn't work. Full-fledged denial kicked in, this was last week on Tuesday. I have literally glossed over the reality that my laptop is unusable. This weekend my dad was home, rendering the computer I am typing on at this moment--in his bedroom--unusable. I pretended like the urge to write just wasn't there. This is similar, for those of you unfamiliar, to say not having a tongue but trying to pretend you are able otherwise able to eat and speak. I laid in bed with library books all weekend listening to the radio. My music is on my laptop, too. I kept telling myself, this too shall pass.
And therein, the point of this post.
Thank god for Brooks, for Sam, for Erika. The ones who need the nurturing as much as air. I lived for years denying that part of me, and then wondering why I felt so consistently deadened inside. I am writing an entire book about this struggle. I dont feel crazy, or like it's something made up, anymore. In the past month I have had extensive conversations with each of those people about this very thing. It makes me miss Laura Walsh, who I spent every solstice with for years, and our talks. Laura who sat for hours and hours in the Chestertown coffee shop with me discussing this struggle as I bit by bit garnered the strength I'd need to change my priorities. So this post is for them, the crazies. For Laura and Kat, Erika and Kirsten. For Molly, who lost the battle. For Sam and Brooks, the two most kind and gentle, glorious magician men I have ever known. This holiday, at the end of this good year, I am so, so thankful to have such tribespeople in my realm.
So long as I have pen and paper I will have to be alright.
And that is all I know to say about that.
He quit his job the day after I did in March, we both worked in the same office and the idea was we were both moving to the city to follow our dreams. He is doing amazingly well, is the host beginning tonight of the Balitmore Song Writers open mic in Fells and this is among at least four or five other big deal things. When we used to work in cubicles across from one another every week we would talk high-energy, deeply riveting "Narnia" talk (Narnia a reference he came off the cuff with last night, talking about relationships with "normal", un-arty people. We need them, he said, "to help pull the ropes and lead us out of Narnia.") I used to grab him and yank him towards Narnia--literally take him hand and run us out the back door of the employment agency and through the hard parking lot in the cold light of the sun. I'd make us walk on a patch of grass-slanted hill, the only section in that area of Easton not paved. Eventually he caught on and would do the same to or for me. Yank me out the door when my head needed a check and take me out for duende talk, food and sun. Our enthusiasm, talking Campbell's bliss-talk and serendipity and inspiration--constantly quoting philosophers or poets or musicians musicians musicians--was unstoppable.
I've tried not to think about it at all and the proof of that fact is it didn't even come up in conversation last night, but my laptop is down and it is killing me. The hardest part of not having it is staring me down this morning--all scowling face and fang-toothed today. And that's going on the road. Ahead of me is lots of uncharted time, 6 days in fact of road trip, that would normally be cleaved in to long swaths at various coffee shops between Annapolis and Baltimore working on my novel and blogging and so forth. The thought of being without that sustenance is making my stomach turn. The other thing about not having my laptop is not being able to write poetry, too, which I am used to doing at least once a week propped up in bed on a lounge of pillows in the most comfortable place in my world, letting the words drop and flow and come and come.
This all happened in Memphis the week before last when I went to visit Sean. He has this intercom thing that runs radio stations all through the house and we listened to Christmas music from the moment my family stepped through the door. So I was in my guest room after a shower and turned on my laptop and turned off the intercom and typed in the address for Pandora. I'm all for being festive but I needed a break and the myth is always upon me these days, the creative life flourishing there beneath the surface at all times and I believe I need to nurture it much as I can, I believe this can be done through music and reading poems and being present in the still cold winter air and also by being brave. There were ads that kept popping up on my computer though, and a commercial for Wal-mart that wasn't even connected to a pop-up but that wouldn't turn off. Next just like that my adrenaline was already going and my head full of panic and memories of the late nineties and the computer at mom's infested with spyware. I quick turned my laptop off and pretended it wasn't happening and I numbed the part of me that needs that nurturing same as it needs air.
A few days later Justin from work texted me through trying to remove it on my own. It didn't work. Full-fledged denial kicked in, this was last week on Tuesday. I have literally glossed over the reality that my laptop is unusable. This weekend my dad was home, rendering the computer I am typing on at this moment--in his bedroom--unusable. I pretended like the urge to write just wasn't there. This is similar, for those of you unfamiliar, to say not having a tongue but trying to pretend you are able otherwise able to eat and speak. I laid in bed with library books all weekend listening to the radio. My music is on my laptop, too. I kept telling myself, this too shall pass.
And therein, the point of this post.
Thank god for Brooks, for Sam, for Erika. The ones who need the nurturing as much as air. I lived for years denying that part of me, and then wondering why I felt so consistently deadened inside. I am writing an entire book about this struggle. I dont feel crazy, or like it's something made up, anymore. In the past month I have had extensive conversations with each of those people about this very thing. It makes me miss Laura Walsh, who I spent every solstice with for years, and our talks. Laura who sat for hours and hours in the Chestertown coffee shop with me discussing this struggle as I bit by bit garnered the strength I'd need to change my priorities. So this post is for them, the crazies. For Laura and Kat, Erika and Kirsten. For Molly, who lost the battle. For Sam and Brooks, the two most kind and gentle, glorious magician men I have ever known. This holiday, at the end of this good year, I am so, so thankful to have such tribespeople in my realm.
So long as I have pen and paper I will have to be alright.
And that is all I know to say about that.
October 1, 2010
On Craft: Ferlinghetti & The Real Work.
Glad for the discourse, the go between that happens in the mythic when I engage myself creatively. The serendipitous alignment that entrances Brooks and I...couldn't get five pages of my novel done the other night so I blog rolled for inspiration and discovered Mike's post about Icarus. Dead-on time for me, because so recently I was feeling so good about having the vision for my book locked-in, but not being able to write had me fighting myself in such a gnarly way my wings definitely felt burnt. I write a response back, and link to a post I wrote last year about the Duende, and that post eyeballs me with Liz Gilbert's whole piece about creativity being a dance.
My job, do the work. Write the words, period.
Not my job: to figure out why or why not, how or when the Presence, the great Muse or Duende or Genie or Impulse or whatever else I call it, will show up and visit and it will all feel right and with the flowwww...
My job, do the work. Continue to educate, to read. To read to read to read, and to cultivate fresh, open mind. This is The Real Work--remember that? Literally, show up. & too, the intriguing relationship between showing up and taking in new knowledge and doing so in a non- prejudiced way. Let's take apart that word: non-pre-judged...My application of Real Work, to show up to your own life in a active way, courageously taking yourself on. Finding where you are programmed to beliefs, ideas or behaviors that are not authentically your own. Unselecting them.
Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First thought may be worst thought. This is Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Poetry as Insurgent Art. I love this. It is saying just that to me: question everything, including the what-I-consider-sacred. First thought=Best thought? Well, this is extraordinary, yes. Spondown works for me because I believe in honesty, writing the truest sentence I know. Which means I just sit down and Gooooooo with the words to get it all out, come what may. BUT--what if the first ten thoughts are fear-riddled, are examples of me lying to myself because it happens that the subject matter arises insecurities, and insecurities for me taunt out old defenses I picked up as a kid or something. First thought=truth in that scenario, but only in so much as Herman Hesse would teach. Everything is true, including the opposite of the truth...
So for today's lesson, kiddies? I'll leave us with us this, also from Ferlinghetti:
Dont be so openminded that your brains fall out.
& yet (fine, subtle nuance, funny little dissident line where ever-present newness of this eternal creative moment lives....)
Become a new mind and make it newer.
My job, do the work. Write the words, period.
Not my job: to figure out why or why not, how or when the Presence, the great Muse or Duende or Genie or Impulse or whatever else I call it, will show up and visit and it will all feel right and with the flowwww...
My job, do the work. Continue to educate, to read. To read to read to read, and to cultivate fresh, open mind. This is The Real Work--remember that? Literally, show up. & too, the intriguing relationship between showing up and taking in new knowledge and doing so in a non- prejudiced way. Let's take apart that word: non-pre-judged...My application of Real Work, to show up to your own life in a active way, courageously taking yourself on. Finding where you are programmed to beliefs, ideas or behaviors that are not authentically your own. Unselecting them.
Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First thought may be worst thought. This is Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Poetry as Insurgent Art. I love this. It is saying just that to me: question everything, including the what-I-consider-sacred. First thought=Best thought? Well, this is extraordinary, yes. Spondown works for me because I believe in honesty, writing the truest sentence I know. Which means I just sit down and Gooooooo with the words to get it all out, come what may. BUT--what if the first ten thoughts are fear-riddled, are examples of me lying to myself because it happens that the subject matter arises insecurities, and insecurities for me taunt out old defenses I picked up as a kid or something. First thought=truth in that scenario, but only in so much as Herman Hesse would teach. Everything is true, including the opposite of the truth...
So for today's lesson, kiddies? I'll leave us with us this, also from Ferlinghetti:
Dont be so openminded that your brains fall out.
& yet (fine, subtle nuance, funny little dissident line where ever-present newness of this eternal creative moment lives....)
Become a new mind and make it newer.
July 1, 2010
Mash-up: Beach thoughts; and Yachats poems from the book where magical thinking goes
Living with my parents again. Who are living with each other, again. We communicate now.
We talk about it. "Communication."
When did that happen?
It's all so natural living here, I thought it would be so hard with Tim and Mary and my cousins gone, with this being our house, me mom and dad ours for the first time really since I was 12. But it's smooth, easy, and this has a lot to do with how much time I spent here last year, Thursday night through Monday morning every week through the summer and in to the fall, so long as there was sun. It's weird, why now, with my brother moving away?
---
yachats, oregon.
6.12.10.
there is only
the illusion of control
or surrender to the knowledge
of fear:
We have none
& are it, that is
we become what we resist
by thinking we are its master.
fear is the wild card inside
Great Reckoning:
coming to terms with this
---
The weather was so great today. I sat forever on the beach, floated forever on top of the sea. The water was blue-green, close as crystal for the Mid-Atlantic. There was a strong wind, it made the waves roll in peaks to the right, the peaks lifted and carried me. We played games, the water and me, hide and seek and peekaboo. Make-believe. I was smiley the wind was like its own kind of wave and the air and the sea lifted and tilted and rocked and carressed me.
Mom came she brought wraps from Southside Deli the shrimp salad there's the best around. The lifeguards are young and hot and more than once they checked me out. I'm too old for you I want to tell them but from that far away why bother, if they cant tell. Besides I'm lying anyway it feels great to also feel sexy and hot.
---
I sat on rocks in the bright sun
blue sky & sea, Yachats, Oregon, off coast 101.
The 804. Old highway leads to the rocky beach.
Mike gone last time I was here, I went close
to the gaping wide mouth of the sea, where she eats
rocks. There are birds bigger than three of my fists.
They are dark, are crows, are ready to eat
they caw at me & always are in three.
I forgot they were here.
---
The older we get
The older we get the more important imagination. The more we need imagination! The more we must shake loose convention! The more we must not shrink to seeming societal or other imaginary (get it--it goes both ways!) restriction. Imagination! The only place where the still small voice lives!
I dont tell him this, my dad, when he walks in from work tonight and sits down at his laptop and continues his already 60 hour work week at the kitchen table and simultaneously wants to have a talk. You never, ever know when this knew phenomena might arise and tonight I am trying to drink tea and write poems.
So Kel, what's the game plan? Are you going to get published now? I think he only asks because he's recently been around his brothers who like to oneup in the name of family pleasantness and looking out for each other, and I point out as much, my own coy defense, but still the truth far as I can see. Which means it's my opinion but still important, all the same.
I dont know dad? Hanging out til the fall. Then I'll see what's in my heart then. Travelling? I dont tell him I dont know dad I am writing poems. I am worshiping Nature and the cycles of life. I am listening to and connecting every day to the lightness in my spirit. All else will easily take care of itself....I have a calling to the Earth and to write a book about it but dad how am I supposed to know what that will look like?
Why dont I be your personal assistant pop? Put me on your payroll? This is followed by jokes from mom about being dad's lifecoach. It is a pretty funny thought. Deep warm fuzzies and motivational talks featuring dad and Kel.
He laughs and this trails him off. I feel the old residue of guilt for a minute but shake my head at it then watch it turn to dust. I blow it away.
---
These rocks are bed.
These rocks are a bed
made from the sea, left
over salt particles crystalize
underground turbine force solid oncemotion
of what once has been. Sea rocks big as chambers
in the jawlock grip of the sky. Sea rocks with sky eyes
hold jewels waterlocked inside. I sat on the rocks
my eyes made of shells.
Turbinado. Turbinado's a name for sugar.
Sugarmelt softener softens like clover petals
sweet but last bite stung on the tongue.
Sweet to melt, melt sparse words
of what is yet to come. What matters, a lot
when you look at it like that. When you look at it
like sand, melts on the tongue.
---
Now I do feel bad. What should I have said? I dont know dad, what do you want me to do with my life?
This by no measure can possibly even come close to the the level of bad I felt last summer. I used to just sit in the family room and cry. Cry to Tim and Mary, cry to Erin, cry to mom, cry to dad. So much letting it out. Meantime going deeper and deeper, back and back, further and further in the real work. Owning my old beliefs. Owning and naming the true real sources reasons behind my stuckness, behind my discontentedness, behind the always striving but-for-what? unseen ideas that were propelling me. The clawfanged perfectionism, the critic of me breathing down my own neck and for what? All those old beliefs, old world, old school. Old memories swirling beneath my mindscreen eager to fall out of my head. And sucking my true power, dis-abling me from being me.
From just being able to "be".
So much grief came with getting beyond all that.
In order to get to the place where I can just be. I barely know any one able to do that.
What fucking gives?
---
A couple sits, looks out at the waves.
The waves sound like waves, like handsaults
sommering on the sea. Summer-saults
instantaneous washboard the churning hellos
the tumble over ocean throws of 'you're looking at me
surprise, I can see' the sea. I am you, he thinks.
She laughs, the mirror-force look that is sweet.
His stomach pulses, hers. Her purse falls
at their feet. Lipstick offering to the sea
sea eats lips licks its lips on lipstick offering
made so crisp. She shakes a chain lock
he grimaces. They freeze.
I am alive. I am alive! You cry but do not
know you're looking at me. I sommersault
I gulp drink with lippy lips lipped jawwide
from the cup
of love
in the sea
sky. I love you friend. I will, til the end.
---
After the beach today I came home and sat on the back porch and read. I love the back porch of Ocean Pines, it's one of my very favorite places since I was a small little kid. The sun was shaking its light in little back and forth trails on the wall because of how it came through the trees. It made the wall look like a blurred screen.
The air was the softest, breathiest breeze.
I sat out there until it got too dark to see. My mom is hooked and always has been on So You Think You Can Dance and the truth is I like to watch, too, but wont unless someone else puts in on. We watched that when I came in and I did laundry, which just means my work uniforms, because I have three doubles in a row this weekend, happy holiday all you weekenders to the beach be sure you tip me well.
I love working there now. It's funny for me to have mind-scenes of memories: marsh grass before the condos went in and all the places we used to go and sneak beers that smelled like salt and wet wood. I love getting to work and look out at and feel the Bay and the sky all at the same time.
---
The only thing to gain is the reckoning~
give over fine illusion of the soul's control.
At the sea, by the large powerbreaker rock
big as a jet or the pumpkin turned carriage ride.
I walked to see. It was blue sky, blue sea.
The force of it frightened me.
I could try to wrangle it, or submit
& just let it be
We talk about it. "Communication."
When did that happen?
It's all so natural living here, I thought it would be so hard with Tim and Mary and my cousins gone, with this being our house, me mom and dad ours for the first time really since I was 12. But it's smooth, easy, and this has a lot to do with how much time I spent here last year, Thursday night through Monday morning every week through the summer and in to the fall, so long as there was sun. It's weird, why now, with my brother moving away?
---
yachats, oregon.
6.12.10.
there is only
the illusion of control
or surrender to the knowledge
of fear:
We have none
& are it, that is
we become what we resist
by thinking we are its master.
fear is the wild card inside
Great Reckoning:
coming to terms with this
---
The weather was so great today. I sat forever on the beach, floated forever on top of the sea. The water was blue-green, close as crystal for the Mid-Atlantic. There was a strong wind, it made the waves roll in peaks to the right, the peaks lifted and carried me. We played games, the water and me, hide and seek and peekaboo. Make-believe. I was smiley the wind was like its own kind of wave and the air and the sea lifted and tilted and rocked and carressed me.
Mom came she brought wraps from Southside Deli the shrimp salad there's the best around. The lifeguards are young and hot and more than once they checked me out. I'm too old for you I want to tell them but from that far away why bother, if they cant tell. Besides I'm lying anyway it feels great to also feel sexy and hot.
---
I sat on rocks in the bright sun
blue sky & sea, Yachats, Oregon, off coast 101.
The 804. Old highway leads to the rocky beach.
Mike gone last time I was here, I went close
to the gaping wide mouth of the sea, where she eats
rocks. There are birds bigger than three of my fists.
They are dark, are crows, are ready to eat
they caw at me & always are in three.
I forgot they were here.
---
The older we get
The older we get the more important imagination. The more we need imagination! The more we must shake loose convention! The more we must not shrink to seeming societal or other imaginary (get it--it goes both ways!) restriction. Imagination! The only place where the still small voice lives!
I dont tell him this, my dad, when he walks in from work tonight and sits down at his laptop and continues his already 60 hour work week at the kitchen table and simultaneously wants to have a talk. You never, ever know when this knew phenomena might arise and tonight I am trying to drink tea and write poems.
So Kel, what's the game plan? Are you going to get published now? I think he only asks because he's recently been around his brothers who like to oneup in the name of family pleasantness and looking out for each other, and I point out as much, my own coy defense, but still the truth far as I can see. Which means it's my opinion but still important, all the same.
I dont know dad? Hanging out til the fall. Then I'll see what's in my heart then. Travelling? I dont tell him I dont know dad I am writing poems. I am worshiping Nature and the cycles of life. I am listening to and connecting every day to the lightness in my spirit. All else will easily take care of itself....I have a calling to the Earth and to write a book about it but dad how am I supposed to know what that will look like?
Why dont I be your personal assistant pop? Put me on your payroll? This is followed by jokes from mom about being dad's lifecoach. It is a pretty funny thought. Deep warm fuzzies and motivational talks featuring dad and Kel.
He laughs and this trails him off. I feel the old residue of guilt for a minute but shake my head at it then watch it turn to dust. I blow it away.
---
These rocks are bed.
These rocks are a bed
made from the sea, left
over salt particles crystalize
underground turbine force solid oncemotion
of what once has been. Sea rocks big as chambers
in the jawlock grip of the sky. Sea rocks with sky eyes
hold jewels waterlocked inside. I sat on the rocks
my eyes made of shells.
Turbinado. Turbinado's a name for sugar.
Sugarmelt softener softens like clover petals
sweet but last bite stung on the tongue.
Sweet to melt, melt sparse words
of what is yet to come. What matters, a lot
when you look at it like that. When you look at it
like sand, melts on the tongue.
---
Now I do feel bad. What should I have said? I dont know dad, what do you want me to do with my life?
This by no measure can possibly even come close to the the level of bad I felt last summer. I used to just sit in the family room and cry. Cry to Tim and Mary, cry to Erin, cry to mom, cry to dad. So much letting it out. Meantime going deeper and deeper, back and back, further and further in the real work. Owning my old beliefs. Owning and naming the true real sources reasons behind my stuckness, behind my discontentedness, behind the always striving but-for-what? unseen ideas that were propelling me. The clawfanged perfectionism, the critic of me breathing down my own neck and for what? All those old beliefs, old world, old school. Old memories swirling beneath my mindscreen eager to fall out of my head. And sucking my true power, dis-abling me from being me.
From just being able to "be".
So much grief came with getting beyond all that.
In order to get to the place where I can just be. I barely know any one able to do that.
What fucking gives?
---
A couple sits, looks out at the waves.
The waves sound like waves, like handsaults
sommering on the sea. Summer-saults
instantaneous washboard the churning hellos
the tumble over ocean throws of 'you're looking at me
surprise, I can see' the sea. I am you, he thinks.
She laughs, the mirror-force look that is sweet.
His stomach pulses, hers. Her purse falls
at their feet. Lipstick offering to the sea
sea eats lips licks its lips on lipstick offering
made so crisp. She shakes a chain lock
he grimaces. They freeze.
I am alive. I am alive! You cry but do not
know you're looking at me. I sommersault
I gulp drink with lippy lips lipped jawwide
from the cup
of love
in the sea
sky. I love you friend. I will, til the end.
---
After the beach today I came home and sat on the back porch and read. I love the back porch of Ocean Pines, it's one of my very favorite places since I was a small little kid. The sun was shaking its light in little back and forth trails on the wall because of how it came through the trees. It made the wall look like a blurred screen.
The air was the softest, breathiest breeze.
I sat out there until it got too dark to see. My mom is hooked and always has been on So You Think You Can Dance and the truth is I like to watch, too, but wont unless someone else puts in on. We watched that when I came in and I did laundry, which just means my work uniforms, because I have three doubles in a row this weekend, happy holiday all you weekenders to the beach be sure you tip me well.
I love working there now. It's funny for me to have mind-scenes of memories: marsh grass before the condos went in and all the places we used to go and sneak beers that smelled like salt and wet wood. I love getting to work and look out at and feel the Bay and the sky all at the same time.
---
The only thing to gain is the reckoning~
give over fine illusion of the soul's control.
At the sea, by the large powerbreaker rock
big as a jet or the pumpkin turned carriage ride.
I walked to see. It was blue sky, blue sea.
The force of it frightened me.
I could try to wrangle it, or submit
& just let it be
May 17, 2010
Long Letter to my Readers
Sometimes I want to start this blog the way I used to start my litmag Cantalma. Like I'm writing a letter. Dear Friends...Today it came out instinctively to write Hey Pals... so let's pretend that that's what I'm doing. Writing a letter to my readers, anonymous or otherwise, out there in the middle of the everchanging everthesame wide world of blogoland. Wherein I find comfort, and release.
Hey Pals,
It's something like 4:30 am. I woke up around 3 and couldn't get back to sleep, but didn't put the light on til a half hour ago. For a while I laid there, thinking the noises I was hearing are the giant fucking practically baseball sized roaches that have begun to show themselves at least daily since I started filling my apartment with cardboard boxes and all these magnificent little dark spaces for them to hide. God that ills me out blugghgghghghhgghgh but I am thankful for them because it's making it really easy to so want to leave this place. Then I imagined the bumping around was the ghosts of this old house that the across the hall neighbor Rebecca has seen, and often hears. In the end I turned the lights on to get some water and there were no bugs, and no haunts, at least that I could tell.
It was a long, sweet weekend. Friday was 12 hours long, I went in to my office for my last day and then up to the college for my exit interview which the HR person kept referring to in email as my Termination Interview. Which made me laugh but also mildly nervous to walk up there and turn my paperwork in, but wouldn't you know I came in and sat down and she said I hear you're moving home because your husband got transferred, I'm from Baltimore, too, Dunalk, hon. I explained that it actually is because really I have no friends or family here in Easton or on the midshore or a life really other than my job, and that I was originally from a town called Millersville outside Glen Burnie, that I am the exact oppositte of married and that first I am waiting tables at the beach to make money but before that going out to the PacNW for a month and then going to move home, then we got down to talking Hons. It was like talking to an old girlfriend that I didn't realize I missed even though Sue and me, the HR lady, had never really met before.
Later in the office trying to get my last bits of work turned in I finally gave up and just said I'd turn it in Tuesday when I have to return and give my work computer back. I was too excited and Mary's office on campus has too much of a blowing breeze. Soon it was almost five so Jackie the Executive Director of our whole department, and my immediate boss Elaine, and Mary they all drove me up to Kent Island for dinner on the water. Natasha came, and Carolee, and Jan all the way from Chestertown and some other teachers and of course Jason and Kim and Brenda, too. Then Cindy showed up, and she ended up taking me back to my car, where we sat and talked for two more hours while a nice round thunderstorm came through. Cindy is the woman I used to teach English with, nighttimes twice a week, at the elementary school in the country out near the Delaware line. This was 2006 and on. She also is the one who introduced me to Teena and had me do a catering gig for her back then, and Teena's the one who rented me the room on the Choptank River when I finally summoned the courage to leave Brandon and break his heart and move out and away to a place so isolated that even now that fast year I spent there still is surreal to me like a dream. Cindy and I, really, hadn't talked and really caught up since I very first moved out to Chop. We had lots, lots to catch the other one up on.
On Saturday I got up and couldn't get moving. I had to be in Pennsylvania first for a baby shower then a bachelorette party. The radio was danceable though and in moments it was so good and the sky was so blue, and I read this blog a long long while which I hadn't done in a long time. It made me feel good to have this, these archives of me because I, like all people, compelled as I am by my self and also very very deep, need to have a place to catalog and process me.
The drive up 83 especially was good. I listened to Rachel Sage and Ruut, both of whom I met last weekend when Brooks got to open for them. Rachel Sage especially is so deliciously good, and I thought how very much I like to hear the accordian. It makes me feel like a gypsy which probably is just to say it makes me feel more wild and whimsy and mystery like I really am. When I got to York I was proud of myself for knowing my way around even though my GPS got me lost at first, finally I just turned that bitch off and got there on my own instincts in the hot Pennsylvania concrete traffic and sun. I walked in to the basement at Aunt Lori's house almost an hour late and it was a huge commotion of people and when I walked in from the far side of the room I heard cousin Chels yell Wait where's Kelly? Chelsea is pregnant, and psychic like all the women in that family and I saw her in the corner and all the commotion was because she was about to open gifts. And I dont know how to put this part in words--that Chels, who's 19, is bringing our first grandbaby in to this world, or great grandbaby I mean, and my grandparents were both sick last year, but still are so robust. And when we are together, which we do more often now, mom her two sisters my brother and his fiance my grandparents and two cousins, we cry a lot and it is always hot and full in our chest because every breathing moment with them is awareness of life and how much we are blessed. So I walked in and Chels knew in her blood I just got there, and she waited for me to sit at her feet and then the gift opening began. Then a half hour later she goes Wait, where's Sean? and then of course we look up and he, my brother, walks in. We did well, Pap only really cried, which is what makes the rest of us bawl, really hard once and then we all were crying and gasping and laughing and wiping our faces with napkins and the other guests cried and laughed some, too.
Then I left, got out on to the rolling green hills and farmhouse lanes of Rt. 30 to drive to Fairfield right outside Gettysburg. My cousin Sarah on my dad's side, the Mc-clan, is getting married soon so next was to celebrate that. On Route 30 I got reminiscent but before it got overboard this song Lost in Pennsylvania came on and I laughed out loud, like really hardy belly laugh because Rt. 30 and me have history. York to Philly, Philly to York, York to Gettysburg and all that sky and green. I always always have such good reflection on that road and Saturday was no different. I was reflecting on the last time I made that drive and how much has changed since then. The last time it was July and Josh, who is the man that I fell in mad love with some years back and ultimately was the final reason I had courage enough to leave Brandon and follow me towards my own thing, called at the end when I pulled in to my cousin's driveway. I hadn't heard from him in like four months back then because of a hurtful falling out, and the thing about Rt. 30 is that's how I used to get from my grandparents over to his house. We always had that psychic thing too, Josh and I, among other connections, and so I was thinking back a lot on him. Next thing, over the glorious piano Ruut sings Lost in Pennsylvania and I'm like Whaaaaa? Did she just say lost in Pennsylvania because it was the first time hearing that CD. Then at that very moment mom called. Mom is from the PA hills and that was really on my mind, too, backroads and southern Pennsylvania and mom and her country people. She called to ask what I was doing. I told her driving and thinking about you and thinking about Josh and now cracking up becasue this lady is singing about Josh and I same time as me thinking about us. And mom reminded me of a time long ago going to work a bluegrass festival in those very hills and how she used to be in love back then with a well-known Nashville musician. Within moments I was at the very place, 8 miles east of Gettysburg, that the festival she was talking about is held. It was all so timely, and the conversation was good and sweet and I felt whole and clean, and happy to see Sarah the bride-to-be and the other cousins waiting to see me.
Now it is Monday morning, the birds are singing and Crow was just squawking, too. The sky out the window in my meditation room is blue and pink tinged so it's all resonant in that morning purple hue. Yesterday also was a long day and last night I wanted to finish uploading my old pics--late 80's through late 90's--on to my external hard drive so that when I move Wednesday and my couple things go in to storage that huge tupperware with all the old albums can just stay there. But I was tired, went late to Target to get a new swimsuit and that took a long time because for the first time in a long time I felt bad about how I looked which made me uncomfortable, but also grateful, because I almost never ever have to deal with that leftover teenage weirdness anymore. So when I got back home I went right to bed, didn't even keep my eyes open long enough to read my book.
I move Wednesday to Ocean Pines. Kelly Johnson, Sean, Bdubb and Brooks are going to help me. Thursday I'm taking Amy out for a pedicure to celebrate Maddie, her third child, due in July. Friday my cousin Timmy graduates college, Friday night we're all going dancing at Red Maple, Saturday's Eryka Badu. Then back to the Pines til Wednesday of the following week, when I fly to Oregon, and will be boundless, yet tall tree mountain coasts hot springs cities and hippies and Pacific ocean bound.
Yaaaaay!!!! When I get home it will be summer time and all that hotass Marilen mug. I'll be a waitress again, a writer for sure, babys will come, weddings will happen, and I will stare and smile a lot at the sea. I will swim. For now, I am sleepy, pals. Thank you for reading and always journeying along with me. Thank you all for the love and support even when you dont comment thankfully the blog counter tells me you still read. I am contented, awed, and eager because I feel certain the best is yet to be....
My wishes and prayers for the same to all of you xoxo.
Love, kel
Hey Pals,
It's something like 4:30 am. I woke up around 3 and couldn't get back to sleep, but didn't put the light on til a half hour ago. For a while I laid there, thinking the noises I was hearing are the giant fucking practically baseball sized roaches that have begun to show themselves at least daily since I started filling my apartment with cardboard boxes and all these magnificent little dark spaces for them to hide. God that ills me out blugghgghghghhgghgh but I am thankful for them because it's making it really easy to so want to leave this place. Then I imagined the bumping around was the ghosts of this old house that the across the hall neighbor Rebecca has seen, and often hears. In the end I turned the lights on to get some water and there were no bugs, and no haunts, at least that I could tell.
It was a long, sweet weekend. Friday was 12 hours long, I went in to my office for my last day and then up to the college for my exit interview which the HR person kept referring to in email as my Termination Interview. Which made me laugh but also mildly nervous to walk up there and turn my paperwork in, but wouldn't you know I came in and sat down and she said I hear you're moving home because your husband got transferred, I'm from Baltimore, too, Dunalk, hon. I explained that it actually is because really I have no friends or family here in Easton or on the midshore or a life really other than my job, and that I was originally from a town called Millersville outside Glen Burnie, that I am the exact oppositte of married and that first I am waiting tables at the beach to make money but before that going out to the PacNW for a month and then going to move home, then we got down to talking Hons. It was like talking to an old girlfriend that I didn't realize I missed even though Sue and me, the HR lady, had never really met before.
Later in the office trying to get my last bits of work turned in I finally gave up and just said I'd turn it in Tuesday when I have to return and give my work computer back. I was too excited and Mary's office on campus has too much of a blowing breeze. Soon it was almost five so Jackie the Executive Director of our whole department, and my immediate boss Elaine, and Mary they all drove me up to Kent Island for dinner on the water. Natasha came, and Carolee, and Jan all the way from Chestertown and some other teachers and of course Jason and Kim and Brenda, too. Then Cindy showed up, and she ended up taking me back to my car, where we sat and talked for two more hours while a nice round thunderstorm came through. Cindy is the woman I used to teach English with, nighttimes twice a week, at the elementary school in the country out near the Delaware line. This was 2006 and on. She also is the one who introduced me to Teena and had me do a catering gig for her back then, and Teena's the one who rented me the room on the Choptank River when I finally summoned the courage to leave Brandon and break his heart and move out and away to a place so isolated that even now that fast year I spent there still is surreal to me like a dream. Cindy and I, really, hadn't talked and really caught up since I very first moved out to Chop. We had lots, lots to catch the other one up on.
On Saturday I got up and couldn't get moving. I had to be in Pennsylvania first for a baby shower then a bachelorette party. The radio was danceable though and in moments it was so good and the sky was so blue, and I read this blog a long long while which I hadn't done in a long time. It made me feel good to have this, these archives of me because I, like all people, compelled as I am by my self and also very very deep, need to have a place to catalog and process me.
The drive up 83 especially was good. I listened to Rachel Sage and Ruut, both of whom I met last weekend when Brooks got to open for them. Rachel Sage especially is so deliciously good, and I thought how very much I like to hear the accordian. It makes me feel like a gypsy which probably is just to say it makes me feel more wild and whimsy and mystery like I really am. When I got to York I was proud of myself for knowing my way around even though my GPS got me lost at first, finally I just turned that bitch off and got there on my own instincts in the hot Pennsylvania concrete traffic and sun. I walked in to the basement at Aunt Lori's house almost an hour late and it was a huge commotion of people and when I walked in from the far side of the room I heard cousin Chels yell Wait where's Kelly? Chelsea is pregnant, and psychic like all the women in that family and I saw her in the corner and all the commotion was because she was about to open gifts. And I dont know how to put this part in words--that Chels, who's 19, is bringing our first grandbaby in to this world, or great grandbaby I mean, and my grandparents were both sick last year, but still are so robust. And when we are together, which we do more often now, mom her two sisters my brother and his fiance my grandparents and two cousins, we cry a lot and it is always hot and full in our chest because every breathing moment with them is awareness of life and how much we are blessed. So I walked in and Chels knew in her blood I just got there, and she waited for me to sit at her feet and then the gift opening began. Then a half hour later she goes Wait, where's Sean? and then of course we look up and he, my brother, walks in. We did well, Pap only really cried, which is what makes the rest of us bawl, really hard once and then we all were crying and gasping and laughing and wiping our faces with napkins and the other guests cried and laughed some, too.
Then I left, got out on to the rolling green hills and farmhouse lanes of Rt. 30 to drive to Fairfield right outside Gettysburg. My cousin Sarah on my dad's side, the Mc-clan, is getting married soon so next was to celebrate that. On Route 30 I got reminiscent but before it got overboard this song Lost in Pennsylvania came on and I laughed out loud, like really hardy belly laugh because Rt. 30 and me have history. York to Philly, Philly to York, York to Gettysburg and all that sky and green. I always always have such good reflection on that road and Saturday was no different. I was reflecting on the last time I made that drive and how much has changed since then. The last time it was July and Josh, who is the man that I fell in mad love with some years back and ultimately was the final reason I had courage enough to leave Brandon and follow me towards my own thing, called at the end when I pulled in to my cousin's driveway. I hadn't heard from him in like four months back then because of a hurtful falling out, and the thing about Rt. 30 is that's how I used to get from my grandparents over to his house. We always had that psychic thing too, Josh and I, among other connections, and so I was thinking back a lot on him. Next thing, over the glorious piano Ruut sings Lost in Pennsylvania and I'm like Whaaaaa? Did she just say lost in Pennsylvania because it was the first time hearing that CD. Then at that very moment mom called. Mom is from the PA hills and that was really on my mind, too, backroads and southern Pennsylvania and mom and her country people. She called to ask what I was doing. I told her driving and thinking about you and thinking about Josh and now cracking up becasue this lady is singing about Josh and I same time as me thinking about us. And mom reminded me of a time long ago going to work a bluegrass festival in those very hills and how she used to be in love back then with a well-known Nashville musician. Within moments I was at the very place, 8 miles east of Gettysburg, that the festival she was talking about is held. It was all so timely, and the conversation was good and sweet and I felt whole and clean, and happy to see Sarah the bride-to-be and the other cousins waiting to see me.
Now it is Monday morning, the birds are singing and Crow was just squawking, too. The sky out the window in my meditation room is blue and pink tinged so it's all resonant in that morning purple hue. Yesterday also was a long day and last night I wanted to finish uploading my old pics--late 80's through late 90's--on to my external hard drive so that when I move Wednesday and my couple things go in to storage that huge tupperware with all the old albums can just stay there. But I was tired, went late to Target to get a new swimsuit and that took a long time because for the first time in a long time I felt bad about how I looked which made me uncomfortable, but also grateful, because I almost never ever have to deal with that leftover teenage weirdness anymore. So when I got back home I went right to bed, didn't even keep my eyes open long enough to read my book.
I move Wednesday to Ocean Pines. Kelly Johnson, Sean, Bdubb and Brooks are going to help me. Thursday I'm taking Amy out for a pedicure to celebrate Maddie, her third child, due in July. Friday my cousin Timmy graduates college, Friday night we're all going dancing at Red Maple, Saturday's Eryka Badu. Then back to the Pines til Wednesday of the following week, when I fly to Oregon, and will be boundless, yet tall tree mountain coasts hot springs cities and hippies and Pacific ocean bound.
Yaaaaay!!!! When I get home it will be summer time and all that hotass Marilen mug. I'll be a waitress again, a writer for sure, babys will come, weddings will happen, and I will stare and smile a lot at the sea. I will swim. For now, I am sleepy, pals. Thank you for reading and always journeying along with me. Thank you all for the love and support even when you dont comment thankfully the blog counter tells me you still read. I am contented, awed, and eager because I feel certain the best is yet to be....
My wishes and prayers for the same to all of you xoxo.
Love, kel
November 24, 2009
Hunger & Ethics: Poetics
I am on, and on and on right now, in defense of or maybe more in definition, of Poetics.
Of my poetics.
O damn craving for self-education!
Scratch that. I am neither defending, nor defining. Nor even educating. I am discovering. giving words to...I am becoming. Battling. Staking claim.
But the idea of defense, and thus definition that I myself may know and claim just what it is I am striking out on behalf of--is pertinent. Because, as I've said and said again. Poetry is a lifestyle. It is not even a choice. It's, well like W.D. Snodgrass says in this interview, a lifelong thing:
If you can be happy doing anything else, do it. George P. Elliott once told me that. This is what he always told people. Everything pays better. Everything is more honestly rewarded.
But if you’ve got to do it, then you’re a life-termer.
I’ve had a lot to do with pacifist organizations. In one of their publications there is a story about a young pacifist who is thrown in prison. He is in on the main floor with all the new guys, and he’s cracking up. Some of the prisoners go to the warden and ask him to do something. They put the new guy up on the top floor with the life-termers, because they had nothing to win. They didn’t have to put anybody down. They were just there. And that’s how it was going to be, and they had to get along. In a few days he settled back down again and he was all right.
Yes. So what do you with a condition that Snodgrass, the "first" confessional, actually compares to being on the ward, cracking up?
You just, you know. Do it. Because it's the fighting it that causes the dismantling, the shaking break down, or worse, as you all artists know: the numb dumb condition. The struck thin and dusty on the inside because no how, no matter what, no matter what else you're doing, if you're not engaged in the work at your baseline You Are Unhappy.
So that it's not how and who you choose to be, as I've claimed in the past, but rather how and who you accept yourself as?
Making choice merely a matter of responsibility to this inherent condition...
Bringing me back round again to The Real Work. Gary Snyder's Zen of being in the moment in all that you do--an idea transferred from the act of meditating, and poem as means of meditation. Perfect in-moment form. Wat Joe Campbell calls peak experience. And to approach it with this placement of commitment, then Poetry becomes the political, too. The experience of being fully engaged.
Adrienne Rich so adeptly seizes us with this idea in her pocketsize pink-jacketed copy of the lecture Poetry and Commitment:
Antonio Gramsci wrote of the culture of the future that "new" individual artists can't be manufactured: art is a part of society--but that to imagine a new socialist society is to imagine a new kind of art that we can't foresee from where we now stand. "One must speak," Gramsci wrote, "of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality..."
In any present society, a distinction needs to be made between the "the poetry of false problems"--and a poetics searching for transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can be thought or said. For now, poetry has the capacity--in its own ways and by its own means--to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossesion, the subjection of women, torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom (italics mine)--that word now held under arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This ongoing future, written off over and over, is still within view. Its elementary condition is the recovery and redistribution of the world's resources that have been extracted from the many by the few.
Making Poetry, aside from a dedicated act of pen and paper, too an ethic.
Which brings me just a few steps closer on the path of my search to the necessity of, as I used to teach my ESL students in order to understand and assimilate, la lengua del gente. The folk lore. Tho in this case not meant literally, but meant as the on the side in the countrysides scribes and tatters of paint and pen. The language of the people. Not anti old white authoritarian, (o fuck dont even get me started on the Cannon, Bloom...) but at least Other than...
(It's not revisionist, afterall, if it's reality?)
And so then, of course, there's the Duende. (Jesus, for pure tru lifeblood O Mighty Poets get your hands on Lorca's essay The Deep Song paragraphs 17-19.) Duende originally what Federico Garcia Lorca is speaking of when he lectures on the value of preserving the cante jando, or deep song, a style specific to flamenco Andalusian music of Spain. After time spent in the juke joints and jazz stops on the east coast of the States in the early 30's, however, Lorca, (like that other tipping pointer of note who found his voice in the same haunts and so influenced whole generations as result--Keroac) assimilated his idea od Duende to include it as a quality: The great artists of the south of Spain, whether Gypsy or flamenco, whether they sing, dance, or play, kow that no emotion is possible unless the duende comes. They may be able to fool people into thinking they have duende--authors and painters and literary fashionmongers do so evry day--but we have only to pay a little attentio and not surrender to indifference in order to discover the fraud and chase away their clumsy artifice.
And I hate to be exclusive, folks. But I gotta say. I know about that. About the duende. And it is this, this quality, I care most about.
Few. FEW have it. But you know, you know when you come across those that do.
Icould go on and on. But will end with this~
My own belief--experiential which you all know is what matters most to me--that on the short end of Dunede lay the distinct and personal in-road to serendipity, to the fine fire of consciousness where in Poetry, as motion, as pure force energy, as nebuli waiting for form, quakes and breathes. And this archetypal draw brings in to cohesion all levels of serendipity, of synchronicity, to see to it that the inroad not only be cultivated, but remained as pure power force, and utilized. Entelechy. Humanism=Source Spirit, in motion. For example:
I am writing right now at the CoffeeCat in Easton. Midway thru this post, a guy who I met weeks ago at a show sat down with me. We met through KJ, who's one of those tipping point people. Tom, the guy, made me promise aloud as he pulled out a chair that I wasn't working. I told him I was, but that I was working on the only work I really cared about. And of course! this guy turns out to be a writer, too. He was published in this e-zine and is currently working on his first full selection of short stories.
I want the tribe I want the tribe I want the tribe. Cuz I need the ones who know. Who get what it means to be on the verge of crack-up anytime you go too long denying who you are...
Of my poetics.
O damn craving for self-education!
Scratch that. I am neither defending, nor defining. Nor even educating. I am discovering. giving words to...I am becoming. Battling. Staking claim.
But the idea of defense, and thus definition that I myself may know and claim just what it is I am striking out on behalf of--is pertinent. Because, as I've said and said again. Poetry is a lifestyle. It is not even a choice. It's, well like W.D. Snodgrass says in this interview, a lifelong thing:
If you can be happy doing anything else, do it. George P. Elliott once told me that. This is what he always told people. Everything pays better. Everything is more honestly rewarded.
But if you’ve got to do it, then you’re a life-termer.
I’ve had a lot to do with pacifist organizations. In one of their publications there is a story about a young pacifist who is thrown in prison. He is in on the main floor with all the new guys, and he’s cracking up. Some of the prisoners go to the warden and ask him to do something. They put the new guy up on the top floor with the life-termers, because they had nothing to win. They didn’t have to put anybody down. They were just there. And that’s how it was going to be, and they had to get along. In a few days he settled back down again and he was all right.
Yes. So what do you with a condition that Snodgrass, the "first" confessional, actually compares to being on the ward, cracking up?
You just, you know. Do it. Because it's the fighting it that causes the dismantling, the shaking break down, or worse, as you all artists know: the numb dumb condition. The struck thin and dusty on the inside because no how, no matter what, no matter what else you're doing, if you're not engaged in the work at your baseline You Are Unhappy.
So that it's not how and who you choose to be, as I've claimed in the past, but rather how and who you accept yourself as?
Making choice merely a matter of responsibility to this inherent condition...
Bringing me back round again to The Real Work. Gary Snyder's Zen of being in the moment in all that you do--an idea transferred from the act of meditating, and poem as means of meditation. Perfect in-moment form. Wat Joe Campbell calls peak experience. And to approach it with this placement of commitment, then Poetry becomes the political, too. The experience of being fully engaged.
Adrienne Rich so adeptly seizes us with this idea in her pocketsize pink-jacketed copy of the lecture Poetry and Commitment:
Antonio Gramsci wrote of the culture of the future that "new" individual artists can't be manufactured: art is a part of society--but that to imagine a new socialist society is to imagine a new kind of art that we can't foresee from where we now stand. "One must speak," Gramsci wrote, "of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality..."
In any present society, a distinction needs to be made between the "the poetry of false problems"--and a poetics searching for transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can be thought or said. For now, poetry has the capacity--in its own ways and by its own means--to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossesion, the subjection of women, torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom (italics mine)--that word now held under arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This ongoing future, written off over and over, is still within view. Its elementary condition is the recovery and redistribution of the world's resources that have been extracted from the many by the few.
Making Poetry, aside from a dedicated act of pen and paper, too an ethic.
Which brings me just a few steps closer on the path of my search to the necessity of, as I used to teach my ESL students in order to understand and assimilate, la lengua del gente. The folk lore. Tho in this case not meant literally, but meant as the on the side in the countrysides scribes and tatters of paint and pen. The language of the people. Not anti old white authoritarian, (o fuck dont even get me started on the Cannon, Bloom...) but at least Other than...
(It's not revisionist, afterall, if it's reality?)
And so then, of course, there's the Duende. (Jesus, for pure tru lifeblood O Mighty Poets get your hands on Lorca's essay The Deep Song paragraphs 17-19.) Duende originally what Federico Garcia Lorca is speaking of when he lectures on the value of preserving the cante jando, or deep song, a style specific to flamenco Andalusian music of Spain. After time spent in the juke joints and jazz stops on the east coast of the States in the early 30's, however, Lorca, (like that other tipping pointer of note who found his voice in the same haunts and so influenced whole generations as result--Keroac) assimilated his idea od Duende to include it as a quality: The great artists of the south of Spain, whether Gypsy or flamenco, whether they sing, dance, or play, kow that no emotion is possible unless the duende comes. They may be able to fool people into thinking they have duende--authors and painters and literary fashionmongers do so evry day--but we have only to pay a little attentio and not surrender to indifference in order to discover the fraud and chase away their clumsy artifice.
And I hate to be exclusive, folks. But I gotta say. I know about that. About the duende. And it is this, this quality, I care most about.
Few. FEW have it. But you know, you know when you come across those that do.
Icould go on and on. But will end with this~
My own belief--experiential which you all know is what matters most to me--that on the short end of Dunede lay the distinct and personal in-road to serendipity, to the fine fire of consciousness where in Poetry, as motion, as pure force energy, as nebuli waiting for form, quakes and breathes. And this archetypal draw brings in to cohesion all levels of serendipity, of synchronicity, to see to it that the inroad not only be cultivated, but remained as pure power force, and utilized. Entelechy. Humanism=Source Spirit, in motion. For example:
I am writing right now at the CoffeeCat in Easton. Midway thru this post, a guy who I met weeks ago at a show sat down with me. We met through KJ, who's one of those tipping point people. Tom, the guy, made me promise aloud as he pulled out a chair that I wasn't working. I told him I was, but that I was working on the only work I really cared about. And of course! this guy turns out to be a writer, too. He was published in this e-zine and is currently working on his first full selection of short stories.
I want the tribe I want the tribe I want the tribe. Cuz I need the ones who know. Who get what it means to be on the verge of crack-up anytime you go too long denying who you are...
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