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?
“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.)
Inspired by Sun Ra’s music, and a recent New Yorker article
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.
Rain rattled the roof/ pummelled the garden and dropped/apricot blossoms
I dig out my Golden Treasury of Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer…
I am excited to announce that my essay, “Holding Open the Open of the World” is one of 17 in the new collection of “Craft Talks” from the It’s About Time Reading Series, begun by Esther Altshul Helfgott more than 29 years ago. The book, from Cave Moon Press, was co-edited by Esther, current series curator, Peggy Sturdivant, and Katie Tynan. Hope to see you there!
Yesterday, I determined to walk
to the southern tip of Standish Shore
a new way, rather than following the curve
of the bay along Marshall Street, past
20 years of memories at 262. This turned
out not to be a shortcut.
Standish Street curved right
to join Crescent, blocks shy
of my goal, but glimpses of light
glancing off water assured me the bay
was near and surely there’d be a park
abutting sand, which there was.
I walked downhill into the dog park
where three little girls picnicked
with their mom on a blanket within
the picket fenced area, their view
south across Kingston Bay. I pattered
past them onto low tide sand.
Soon after I photographed my first
horseshoe crab of this season, I met
a sign on the property line of the adjoining
estate warning me that not only was I not
to trespass, but that the Duxbury police
would be interested if I did.
The tide was so withdrawn, it looked like
I could walk all the way to Plymouth, which
was wrong. Within a hundred feet muck sucked
my sandals until I fell down, but I would not
crawl. I crawled back to shore towards solid
footing, made it to my feet and scowled.
No one watched from the Adirondack chairs
on the broad lawn, no yacht was tied to cleats
off the floating dock. Reeking mud as my entry
badge, I crossed that forbidden land,
picked my way through sand into the rising bay
and rinsed thin brown ribbons down my shins.
Had I recovered dignity? Attempting invisibility,
I walked up Goose Point Lane, through the tony
shore community with its immunity to my sort
of wandering off the path. A sleek couple walked
their biddable dog* in my direction. Their reaction
would tell, and they refused to look at me.
*Confession: the phrase “biddable dog” was stolen from cartoonist and poet Peaco Todd.
I am proud and excited that my poem, “Oyster Master Class,” is included in Washington 129!
Thank you Tod Marshall, Washington State Poet Laureate, Humanities Washington and Arts Washington!