All the 2021 POPO cards to me, hurrah!
Images
Collage for Collage’s Sake
Quinn, 12, my grandchild, and I were walking through the neighborhood. Quinn picked up the “I’m a musical Neanderthal…” scrap off the sidewalk. “Do you want it?” I asked. Quinn is an artist and had dibbsies. ” “You take it,” Quinn replied, handing it to me. I pasted it to this card, and off it went, layers of gel medium protecting it, to another poet in another town. I parted with the rabbit off the front of a card I sent Jim’s mom years before she died. The rabbit is famous, from the Lady and the Unicorn series of tapestries we saw together at the Musee de Cluny in Paris even more years ago.
News From the Noosphere
Bill and “practice”
What I do is stumble, so I’m comforted to think stumbling might save me. And to practice, no matter the worries of the work not being enough, the craft lacking, or sinking or drowned. But putting one word in front of the other and carrying on.
Handmade cards to me
Of the 48 cards that came to me (I signed up for two groups,) these are the handmade 9. Another card was made by the poet, but only the glue no longer attached to the front art survived the trip from her mailbox to mine. A month of purpose and daily practice, a lesson for the rest of the year.
Humanities with Lucia Perillo
Oh! Lucia Perillo’s poems, so cranky and earthly. “Postcard from Florida” (from Inseminating the Elephant,) ends with two little girls on a wooden bulkhead on an estuary with a hose trying to get manatees to drink: “singing Come to us humanities//and oh see how they do.”
Mortal Doors
Love, solitude, greyer and greyer weather. Sunrise is near 8 am, sunset way, way, way before 5. Optimism requires more sunlight. But look at the bright bruises on the picture side of my postcard from August 2021!
Words Will Escape
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.)