Words Will Escape
Blog
Three Ways in the World
In “The Way In,” Linda Hogan writes that the three ways are: dangerous, wounding, and beauty. On my walk through the arboretum under 520 and around the Marsh Island and Foster Island catwalks, I stiffened to brave the tunnel , which always felt dangerous. It is gone, so my walk yesterday was all sunny-ish fall afternoon dying leaf red and yellow beauty.
Issa, my favorite haiku master
Home, so pleasantly cool. Today’s pleasantly cool and raining on the day of the Hunters Moon. (American sentence, Mr. Ginsberg.)
The stakes are myself… di Prima
Talks/fiction readings two nights in a row: Lauren Groff with SAL followed by my dear friend Kip Robinson Greenthal interviewed by Elizabeth Austen at Elliott Bay Books, both remotely from our living room. Shoal Water has taken 35 years to see publication, thanks to Kip’s tenacity and the strength of the story.
Poetry as Insurgent Art
The shoe with rose and dance card in it I cut from a very old advert for hair pins, the yellow door with path I’d saved as dream entranceway in a file folder for years. And here’s Larry Ferlinghetti signaling me through the flames!
Denise Levertov and Kaveh Akbar on language
“And language? Rhythms/of echo and interruption?/that’s/a way of breathing.” wrote Denise Levertov, who lived the last part of her life at the south end of Lake Washington, with a view of and poems about Mt. Rainier. Her poem title, “Looking, Walking, Being” pretty much sums it up for me – alive on the move.
And language. And Kaveh Akbar last night, first SAL Poet of the season read at Hugo House. We watched remotely, still feeling unsafe in crowds. He celebrated the Bushwick Book Club composer/violist/singer Alex Guy and past Youth Poet Laureate and author of “Motherland” Bitaniya Giday, as his first on-stage act, so that I liked him from the get-go. He read from “Pilgrim Bell”, his second book, stretching a leg back, lifting up on his toes so that he loomed high above the mic, twirling his amazement of thick dark hair. He conjured, sang, lamented, pled, questioned, in English and the Farsi he said he does not speak, magical and affecting. Not affected. I will never think of the punctuation mark the period at the end of a sentence in the same way. Did I mean to declare? Demand through imperative?
Tell it Slant
Once again, I spelled Emily Dickenson’s last name wrong, but with intent to do right by her work, making postcards and writing poems at the rate of two per day through August 2021. Threatened fish and noxious weeds, map and compass rose. Can’t argue with the truth of those. Friant Dam above Fresno, Mendota Dam south of Merced in California’s Central Valley, fire behind the ridge above our cabin in Chelan.
Linda Hogan, from “Rapture”
Listen. Rapture is not cop out. Are you more real when you shout?
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.