Listen. Rapture is not cop out. Are you more real when you shout?
Linda Hogan, from “Rapture”
Month: October 2021
Yes is a world
Yes, I would like to believe I live inside that world of yes, Mr. Cummings, it’s the skillfully curled world inside the world of yes that scuttles me.
2021 POPO: Another Card
I inherited three collectible pages of stamps from my mom. What to do with them? Collage onto postcards for 2021 PoPo fest! Maybe there’s a land where you have to make use of all you’ve hoarded: out from the dark spaces inside labelled boxes and into the world.
Walt Whitman contradicts himself
Diane de Prima led me back to Walt Whitman and his barbaric yawp. Do I have the pedigree or a formal three-name name (Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson…) to write poetry? or do I just plain write my long-winded, wide ranging, bragging and generous lines, and let you wrestle with my bonafides?
William Stafford, living definite
“But let me live definite, shock by shock” – how I adore William Stafford’s writing, his books about writing, as well as Lewis & Clark College, where my parents met and my father fixed the school’s cars in the motorpool garage below the manor house where my mother lived on the third floor, near where William Stafford’s son Kim would run the writing program in the little building with the dovecote on top. I went to LC during the time William Stafford taught there, but was thoroughly otherwise occupied jettisoning myself from my family in hopes of arriving shiny new on a shell maybe, unparented, self-created and awesomely original (with no effort whatever, beyond what it took to hitchhike down the Oregon coast with a near-stranger.)
2021 POPO Sun Ra Postcard
Inspired by Sun Ra’s music, and a recent New Yorker article
POPO 2021 Post 1
Poetry is the ultimate inner refuge
August – two postcards per day: art making and poems – there were no “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do” fainting couch dramas. Two poets, every day for 31 days, expected to get an intentional postcard from me. I sent them. Most days I chose a quote from a poem by a poet connected closely (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov), temporally (William Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, Linda Hogan), or because they were poets (Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Issa.) A couple of times the poetry quote was from a poem the poet I was writing had written from another year. Several times I began a poem with a line from the receiving poet. Not only was I busy reading poets in books, I was reading poets on cards. Woven into the month’s process with over 500 others from all over the US and two from B.C., Canada. The ultimate inner refuge met the outer community of poets in the same pursuit. I have 62 artifacts of my own making, slightly fewer received postcards – this year I am most pleased with the visual art I made.