Poetics and the political, Charlie Mars & learning as I go

We sit on different sides of the same table him and me and I forget it's because he writes fiction and I'm a poet but no that's not true, either--it's not that I forgot it's more that I never thought about it in those terms.

It is snowing, hard, when we walk down Goldsborough on our way to see Charlie Mars. He points this out, that he is not a poet and has never written poetry. There are still a few cars on the road downtown but for the most part the air is filled with wet white specs and everything is grey. The Coffee Cat, when we enter, is warm and my glasses mist over immediately with steam. They already had snow drops all over them.

Earlier, when he first got to my place, I was still in my frump clothes and only had time to brush baby powder through my hair and put on some musky oil. While he waited I showed him Carrot's Zine and so of course we immediately started talking Craft.

It's funny how he pisses me off--I defend stream of consciousness and first thought even as I'm thinking about me editing editing editing. Prose and poetry. The intersection between first thought, the consciousness it draws forth from there, and the sensibility to edit but still keep the Beautiful Vision in tact. I think about being pissed and realize there must be something new in this conversation for me to gain.

I think about other men who've pissed me off.

Charlie Mars is good. Really good. I fall in love a little. With him, his movement, his stories, his clear, kaleidoscope voice. I am glad he's not with his band. The poetry moves in me after a while, I want to call out and make him stop and make the snow outside stop coming down and make my skin stop tingling the way it does when the acid first kicks in. Remember that? A body trip we used to call it...but no, this is not acid it is the Duende, the Descention. When the song first hits and starts to ring through me. It makes me, sitting there, feel crazy a little like how it used to when I didn't know what it was.

It would be fun to hang out with Charlie Mars. I think he would be good at making out. Which is or isn't the same as hanging out. Depends on who you're with...Also, his songs are full with stories, like my Memoir, so by the time it is over all I want to do is write. Write until the snow goes away, write until it is night, and then the night is day.

Later, after Charlie Mars and after walking to the grocery store in the snow and no cars on the streets at all, he is sweet and makes a list of things he does when editing. An actual list. I smile a little and there's that inner eye-roll. Teacher Tom. I keep reminding myself to be open, to learn. To be teachable. We are both Aries only three days apart so that's a lot of fire.

Then today we are back at it again, He is very plan plan plan work work work and now I am decisive in putting my finger on his position and refuting it. I've got diPrima out, we've been reading poems to each other. Dinners and Nightmares. I point out who she was, who she is, I identify her myth. Nightmares: Her regular run-ins with violence in the name of authority and institution. I am redblooded and hot faced in defense of her alchemical free verse, impassioned, breathless about women in the fifties being locked in sanitariums and asylums if, for example, they didn't want to marry. Of course it's important to know the Cannon I am saying, I'm not refuting that at all, you need to know the rules in order so that your voice might break them as dictated and become strong and true on your own....

I open Pieces of a Song and run my finger over the bent pages. My eye stops on Poetics which I dont ever remember reading but I know this will be the one. I go there: If the New York School and the establishment were symbolic of the Patriarch then her voice, her Voice, was anti this. She was a scholar. She channeled Blake and Keats. She knew what she was doing. O'Hara and Ginsberg claimed the same things. But can you find a book of hers at Borders? Not often, most times no, no you can not.

I am defending my self. I know this. The white sun is reflecting the snow and my little living room is full of light. I plant my eyes on his, gain silence, and smile. Then read

Poetics (Diane diPrima)
I have deserted my post, I cldnt hold it
rearguard/to preserve the language/lucidity:
let the language fend for itself.
it turned over god knows enough carts in the city streets
its barricades are my nightmares

preserve the language!--there are
enough fascists &
enough socialists
on both sides
so that no one will lose this war

the language shall be my element, I plunge in
I suspect that I cannot drown
like a fat brat catfish, smug
a hoodlum fish
I move more & more gracefully
breathe it in,
success written on my mug till the fishpolice
corner me in the coral & I die

He leaves soon after, I walk him out and breathe deep the fresh air so sparkly it makes me feel like I have lung fulls of clean sharp sun. I go back inside and use all his suggestions, index cards, color-coding, all of it. All afternoon I work and come away with an organization plan for my memoir broken down by year: 1994 all the way through til now.

I am happy, satiated. I am passionate, yes. And learning to be wrong.

Or at least, still learning to learn.

Wild Women Ways: Imbolc Celebration

Tonight is Imbolc, or the festival of the Goddess Brigid, patron Goddess of the Hearth and Poetry. Celebrated traditionally on Feb 2, this ancient holiday is today recognized as Candlmas, Tu Bi-Shevat, even Chinese New Years. The point is, all traditions are moved by the same earthly rhythms, no matter what the society or culture defines it as. Now is the time of mid-winter; classified by the Aquarian Full Moon. It is the time of first light. Winter Solstice marks the longest night of the year and too the return of the sun with solar entry into Capricorn. Capricorn is an earth sign, its energy is initiating, which means ushering in of change, of a new tide. So at the peak of darkness, in comes new energy in earthly--or physical form. The alchemy of the darkest time--and all the darkness peaking, bursting forth with the initiatory energy of Capricorn births new levels of consciousness within us. Now, at Brigids Day, or Candlemas, or Imbolc--emblazoned by the peak energy of Aquarius with tonight's full moon, that energy is given full light. In our quiet time, now is a powerfull, powerfull time of intention setting, prophecy, and empowering our new ideas. Aquarius is an Air sign--a mental energy with ties to our etheric or spirit selves. It is Fixed, meaning what is energized now in our spirit or ether form will between now and the summer solstice come to full fruition.

Take the time to be conscious, whoever you are, whatever you celebrate, about this!

In honor of my own Intentions, and with perfect love trust and gratitude over the tides that have flowed me to just where I am at this time of year, here is a poem. It appears in this years We'Moon, and is reprinted with permission by author Pesha Joyce Gertler, recipient of Seattle's Populist Poet Award for 2005-2006. Ms. Gertler was so very, very kind in our emailing--thank you Wise Mama, thank you!! This was the poem opposite the page of my birthday this year!

The Limping Goddess:She-Who-Survives©1983
She limps into the room
bent with the cargo of rape, battering
single-parent mothering and bureaucratic neglect
if she is fat or gay or nonwhite or Jewish
the pains multiply;
she has carried them all.

Her lotus feet have trudged this planet
for aeons; torn tennis shoes tell
how far she’s traveled. She hunches
against the winter wind, her second-hand
coat like a blanket she wraps around
her golden body. Occasionally, she flies
over buildings, lands on tree tops,
is mistaken for a fat bird.

And occasionally, she falls,
intensifying her limp. But make no mistake;
that golden skin was mined in the black earth,
her feet, though limping and calloused,
are the lotus feet of She-Who-Survives.
A broken yet shining forgotten deity
returning, and there are millions
like her, multi-colored, limping
Goddesses returning to lay down our cargo
and reclaim our own.

Grrrlfriends: Thanks Cash!

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best." — Marilyn Monroe

Sometimes I just need a little reminder.

Zines, bloggers & INVESTMENTS in love that I WANT YOU TO MAKE

Two of the grl bloggers I read both wrote this week about love.

Specifically, about how they dont blog about their love lives bc that part is private and they want to show respect for their lovers.

I was sitting in bed yesterday morning with coffee and quiet, writing poetry and listening and capturing this song that runs and runs so deep. I wrote, and wrote more and more and in slow-mo saw a circle I've been edging and rounding and sort of I guess repressing come through. And soon as I saw it, felt it snap closed.

Laura Veirs played Life is Good Blues and without wanting them to the tears started to come, then came hard. Cuz that's what happens sometimes to me when a soul-circle for me closes. It is relief, and also maybe sadness, and bittersweet thankfulness, over the awarenss that it brings.

And in bed there I had a witnessing, yet again: the ailment of my own human imperfection. How deep and personal this equalizing, impersonal pain can run. It hurt hard and I thought about not only things you aren't aloud to say, but the things you dont get the chance to, or dont know how.

It is true, there are things that will never be witnessed here. It's amazing isn't it? I have a blog that imports to facebook, that gets a decent number of regular visitors and even more random hits, and seemingly it's all right out there...But wow. This last year and my struggles with love...

I have a green hill of burial in my soul and only sometimes, when I am not expecting it, I kneel down there but there are no words; and too, a book with a poem that is endless and a vision I often now am too afraid to own. Like a child I submit to this, to this place of burial and to this holy poetic epoch of ruin, my arms upraised in soft acquiencence to the sun. I lay myself down. It is this wordless hill & this endless poem inside me that each teach of such imperfection, that submit me finally to the real and human me once again.

Maybe one day I will paint a picture of it, that green hill. Maybe one day I will make a Zine about it, that endless poem.

But in the meantime, I want you to go here and buy Carrot Quinn's new zine hunger, love. She is such a rich writer I love to indulge in her ramblings, how her tender quaking outlooks on this hard-edged imperfect world make it all a little better and often make me sigh and remember, oh yes oh yes it all is so okay.

...I will tell about it...

Two days ago the doctor, in less time than it took me to turn off my car in the parking lot of the walk-in clinic and unbuckle my seatbelt, told me I had infected tonsils.

An infected tonsil looks pretty gross.

This morning when I woke up I felt like I'd been holding my breath, my whole body clung frantically to a rock, with gnarly whitecap tumblers breaking over top of me all night long. I couldn't tell: was it my tonsils or had I just slept wrong?

But by the time I was up and out of bed that certain headache that comes, the one that sucks my whole breath from me, was fast on its way. I only get those kind of headaches when I've been clenching my jaw in my sleep.

Then I remembered: I dreamt these funny, peaky-feeling dreams all night long. The half-pulled curtain in my consciousness was throwing fresh images: me, with bruised and bloodied, swollen faces--several, like a series of comic book characters, shots of me--all in varying different proportions of having been beat-up, and each with a doopy grin on my at times toothless face.

On Tuesday night at the funeral for sweet Meggie's father, my buddy Ronnie and I talked forever--Meggie tucked safe the whole time, near the casket, in the corner of our eyes. He told me tales and tales of his family, all based around the coal mines of West Virginia. Two nights before my friend Tom went on about where he's from and the lifestyle that influences society there: the coalmines of North Central PA. Driving home, or to my cousin's home, from South County where the funeral was, a song bittersweet like a sourpatch kid on the tongue caught my attention from the IPOD: Coalminer, by Mia and Jonah.

My grandpop. How'd he come to Baltimore? I dont know. I should know this. His dad, Orlando, came here from Ireland. Had 11 kids. Worked the coal mines in PA til he died.

I got up this morning with this binging headache trying to start. I drank lots of water, ate some cheerios then took some Advil. Then I put two hours of work in from home, and then cancelled all my other plans...

Infected tonsils, according to Louise Hay, indicates creativity stifled or repressed emotions.

Does it really mean that? What if it doesn't?

What if it does?

(Sharon Olds. From the untitled first page of her poetry book Strike Sparks.)

All I know for sure is that I believe, I believe with out question in the deep life, the deep inner world and those inner lights being made real, and shining my way day to day. After those dreams, and the connections about Pop, and my flightiness over some decisions I've got comping up, what I did for the rest of the day was take some much needed quiet time. I got gentle as I could with me and gave myself, in my sacred space, long uncharted time to just be with me, and listen.

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it...Our myths are our lives, as magical and myth-filled as we let them be, as we choose to make them, as we choose to believe...I choose to believe in the magic inside, and the signs without. In my We'Moon calendar the forecast for Aries for the year said to take the quiet time to seek the voices of my ancestors.

I am sitting down to write late in to the night on my Memoir.

I hear you, Pop!