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Saturday, June 18th, 2011
 On the first anniversary of José Saramago's death, Pilar del RÃo scatters his ashes at the foot of an olive tree in Lisbon. (The tree was transplanted from Saramago's birthplace, Azinhaga.) image via elpais.com
posted evening of June 18th, 2011: 1 response
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I've been writing a lot of poetry lately (last week or two or three) -- if you've been reading the blog you have probably noticed... I thought I would just post a brief outline of the process I've been following. (Because: a key part of this process has been analysis, trying to understand what I am doing/seeking in writing the poetry, and how I am going about it. My instinct is that this kind of analysis should be stifling to creativity, but that has not been my experience, in this moment, not at all. The more I ask "why" and "how", the more it seems to work...)
Today I was riding my bike, for exercise and to do some errands. (Made it a little farther up Walker Street!) I was over by Vose and South Orange Ave. when a woman walked by and I overheard her saying to her friend, "Oh, I thought that was my car there by the corner -- we need to walk a little farther." This struck me as funny, and turning it over in my head I heard the first line of a silly poem. Riding along I started repeating this line in a sort of sing-song and it started fleshing itself out with more lines and a structure.... And that's basically how it usually happens, flowing out of a single line or couplet that I "hear" -- The composition works best when I am walking or riding bike, the rhythmic movement gives a background for the rise and fall of syllables (hmm: typing seems to do it too, a bit) that serves best as background for the composition process. A side effect of this is that when I'm reading the poem later on, it is easy to fall into that sing-song; the poem sounds better if I avoid this.
So once I've got a rough idea of the poem in mind, I write it out longhand, usually without division into lines -- the homemade notebook I got from Woody and Lisa has been serving me very well. Let it set a few hours or a few days and then I type it up with line divisions, often I will post it on the blog, usually it is nearly complete by that time -- each point of copying the poem, head to paper, paper to screen, screen to blog, involves revisions. And often I will see a couple of light edits that still need to be made after it has gone up on the blog.
Anyways: I am off to have some coffee and write out that poem. I'll post it later on as an update to this entry, assuming it comes together like I'm thinking it will.
 Update: Yes -- This one came together very quickly and easily. Little substance but some fun imagery.
Parking Lot
Forgetting where you’re parked, a pleasant exercise, I recommend it,
silly mindless feeling, walk around the parking lot with
bags of groceries, or books, or cat food, hardware that you bought to build
your latest home improvement project,
5# nails are clanking in the bag and in your mind
you see
a silver Nissan, license plate
you’ve seen so many times
the image crystal clear imagined,
in the back seat is the laundry that you mean to drop off yesterday
but didn’t, thought I parked it over here, indeed a car
that looks just like mine from a distance -- but it’s not,
and here’s the owner,
now he’s taking out his keys and starting off, I’m back to square one
and I dig back through my memory, I opened up the door
and as I looked over my shoulder saw a note forbidding tresspassing:
it warned illegal parkers would be ticketed, behind that
was a yellow sign; that yellow’s over this way now, so clearly
I was looking that way, must have been right here -- let’s see...
I turn and orient myself, I’m looking at my car.
↻...done
posted morning of June 18th, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, June 16th, 2011
Happy Bloomsday! In case you're looking for something to read today, I see the Calypso episode is now complete at Ulysses, Seen. Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls...
 Oh wow! Also, Robert Berry (author of Ulysses, Seen) is Twittering the events of Ulysses throughout the day today. (He is doing it on Dublin time.) Right now, Stephen is walking down the beach to Sandymount Strand.
posted morning of June 16th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, June 15th, 2011
Dear Photograph is dedicated to finding new photographs of old photographs, in the scene of the old photograph -- it's a beautiful form, it reminds me of Sergei Larenkov's Leningrad project. The site is only a couple of weeks old but they've already got some great pictures. Thanks for the link, Matt!
posted evening of June 15th, 2011: Respond
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The past few days I rode my bike up Walker in West Orange,
There's a hill there up the east side of South Mountain, behind Northfield,
That I've always dreamt of climbing, never done it yet but soon I will,
It's steep, it curves in switchbacks, steep as Lombard Street in Frisco
(which I've never pedaled up, God knows, but maybe if I lived there --)
There's the slope up to Wyoming, which I've ridden many times --
It's a hard slope, tires me out, but I know that I can do it --
Then you ride across Wyoming and it gets a good deal steeper,
That's the hill that always kills me, I can only make it halfway up.
Last night I rode up Luddington, a tiny street, one-way,
Where the slope's a bit more gradual, you're riding transverse up the hill;
I made it up to Lowell Street, as far up as I've ever gone,
But there you have to turn and pedal straight up or straight down.
I took the downhill route -- my legs were just about maxed out,
And there was still another couple hundred feed of climb to go --
So I flew on down the mountain, rushing air around me cooled me down;
I'll take another try tonight and see how far I go.
Riding up a hill's a simple calculus, no need for subtle
Reckoning: your lowest gear, you push, you pump, keep pedaling,
Your cadence slowing down until your legs are scarcely moving,
Maybe you can push yourself along another couple meters;
Then you'll stop, you'll turn around, you'll glide downhill -- exhilarating!
And you get back to the bottom, and you wonder, should you take
Another pass? But no: you head home, drink a beer, you'll try again...
Tomorrow -- Ah, and when you reach the crest, what sense of mastery --
So move on to a steeper mountain, start it all again.
posted evening of June 15th, 2011: 1 response
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The Wooster Collective has some photos of a mural project by Göla, at a school in Palestine, any of which will work very well as desktop wallpaper:
posted evening of June 15th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, June 14th, 2011
At People's Park in Berkeley Howard rants,
he preaches apathy, he begs for change
to buy the food he cooks and gives away.
He sits in lotus, undetected, immanent,
composing rhymes, he sits beneath
the gray sun rising over San Francisco Bay.
The students whom he greets with vulgar
epithets adore him, old man Howard with the
tattooed forehead and the scar across his cheek;
they read him poetry and give him money and they
hark to his pronouncements, he's their oracle,
he's growing leaner week to week.
One Friday he's not there, he must have caught
the bus to Portland, or to Stockton, someone
thinks he heard he has a cousin there;
some relative, a place to crash, a place to
spend the winter without freezing -- who knows
when the East Bay will again see Howard's glare.
The wise old man's gone missing, and the kids will
have to find another object for their primitive
religion, for their idle lark.
Cast your glance across the lawn here,
north to Haste where palm trees grow;
where the homeless men panhandle,
up in People's Park.
posted evening of June 14th, 2011: 2 responses
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Monday, June 13th, 2011
This is my translation of Pelele's poem "Mutilaciones," which touched me so strongly when I read it last week.
Hacking it Apart
by Eduardo Valverde
The cripple in the morning
is the flight, the flight to nowhere,
is the light, the graveyard's light
that's shining, shining in my windows,
it's the bus, the line of buses
stinking sweetly on the roadway,
it's the cat up on the rooftop
where it's watching over the bells.
Half-blindness in the morning
is the frigid bite of dawn,
and forgetfulness's knockers
have no prince, have just a frog,
with the freezing rain foreseen
inside the blossom of my eyes,
inside the corpses of my
promised lands, still warm.
Half-lameness in the morning
is the spirit of the road,
and I've got my eyes wide open,
got my shrunken spirit's cough;
the sun, the half-lit sun, oh
how it's burning in their motors,
it's the end of every heartbreak,
they're in mourning for their games.
The birds get off scot-free,
my reading glasses going blind,
with whole decades slowly
dawning on this Monday.
A tantalizing thought I had on the train home this evening: with fairly minor rewrites, this poem could be set to the tune of David Rawling's "I Hear Them All".
posted evening of June 13th, 2011: 4 responses
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Sunday, June 12th, 2011
New businesses are opening in Vailsburg, Newark's western spur,
The sign on Sweeney's closed-down Liquors says a Subway's coming soon.
Improvement? Well perhaps, but anyways not detriment, besides
It’s good to see the signs of any economic life.
We’re riding bikes through Vailsburg, a group of us from west of here,
To see Marie and Ryan’s shop in Lincoln Park in Newark --
We’re waiting for some slower riders, an older man in slacks and straw hat
Chats with us about riding, about the 5-borough tour, he rides it yearly,
About his bike, a Trek (my model!), it's
“An old-school Trek,†he says, we chuckle.
Now the light turns green, we’re off, we ride due east, South Orange Ave.
We go
til it hits Springfield, downtown Newark and we’re nearly there,
We cut a little south on University and find their place
A few blocks down the way, on Crawford over by the school.
Marie and Ryan greet us and we look around -- Folk Engineered’s
Their company, builds custom bikes, with steel frame for classic look
And high performance, also something new, this year we see,
They’re putting out their first stock model bike, looks great, looks sweet.
Marsupial they’re calling it (still built to order), sleek clean lines --
It looks like an old Schwinn at half the weight.
They show us around the shop and walk us through the steps
Of building a steel frame, the measuring, the milling,
Ryan brazes lugs in for a water-bottle holder and we
Ooh and aah to see his reconditioned old machine tools
And the stately, austere frame that’s standing ready in a vise.
A lovely couple, they infect the whole group with their brio
And they serve us tasty crudités and cookies, fresh-baked,
Ryan’s cool iced-tea, we eat and chat and then we’re ready to head home.
On the way back I break from the group to get home a bit faster,
Sky is clouding up, the rain will come down soon, I think as I look up.
I always feel a little twinge as I ride by South Eleventh Street,
Where Brother’s BBQ was, my old favorite, it’s been closed for years.
I get back to South Orange, sweat is pouring off me,
Coast my way down Montrose in the cloudy twilight, here I am, back home.
So I’ll write up this whole journey as a verse and post it on my blog --
A verse? I’ve never done this -- but it fits to some rough meter,
So let’s get it out there, click on "Publish," see what people think.
Click through for more photos of the shop.
posted evening of June 12th, 2011: 3 responses
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The basic metric unit I've been thinking in poetically's the pæon, tetrasyllable with one stress on the third: and subtly varying the beat count and the emphasis, occasional cæsura, I find it stretches out the thoughts that I come up with and allows me to continue, to connect ideas that I'd not been aware of at the start. This basic pattern of stresses which I've been working with (and which I felt a shock of recognition at seeing confirmed in Pelele's piece the other day) is opening up new ways of hearing my thoughts. Two poems that I wrote yesterday venture a little further afield rhythmically; today's theme is dreams and transitions.
Fuzzy Punctuation
The dreams which I was just inside
come back to me, they give my day
unasked-for structure, so the friendly
stranger walking by on Broadway
smiling beatifically
is in some sense a page from last night's dream-book
(though he doesn't know it)
and he'll stay with me: be
smiling through my day's transactions,
follow to my office, he'll be
watchful as I give my notice,
end another chapter
of my life-book, and his visage
in my dreams and in my waking dream,
illuminates this bland transition,
lifts me up -- his dark brown moustache
serves as fuzzy punctutation,
marking off this minor epoch,
leading on, betokening
the job search that's to come.
Mentor
You can't escape your dreams, the old man said,
and I was not sure what to counter with,
I smiled shyly, hemmed and hawed
and joked, I don't imagine I'll be needing them
where I'm bound, I was going for a reference
to film noir, but it came out more sincere than I intended,
piss-poor irony, the old man said Don't worry,
I remember what you're going through,
I'm sure that you'll pull through until tomorrow. --
Then what? Felt a chill, to hear him use that ugly word,
the one that I'd been dreading,
but he laughed, and clapped me on the back, and winked,
and said that I'd be fine.
posted morning of June 12th, 2011: 1 response
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