Disaster Relief

Didi posted this link on her blog. It seems to be sort of a charitable donation clearinghouse site. It's a non-profit, although it does appear that they charge a processing fee for forwarding donations to the various charities (3% on credit card donations). At least it's a place to start; they list a lot of very useful info about the different charities. There is a heartbreaking need for food, water, and medical personnel and supplies in all the areas affected by the tsunami.

Work or Play?

Various other methods of trying to wake me up from a nap having failed, Scott started reading me the "art" section from an anthology of quotations. Well, that worked eventually, and was more humane than applying cold water or an infuriated cat.

Proving that art is never a "finished product" and that the demands of eternal revision cut across the disciplines:

"Once in a museum Bonnard persuaded his friend Vuillard to distract an attendant while he approached his own old painting, slipped from his pocket a tiny box of paints and a brush the size of a toothpick and added to one of his consecrated canvasses minute touches that set his mind at rest." -- Annette Vaillant

Another quote was by some writer I've never heard of, saying basically that artists shouldn't call what they do "art". By definition, if you're an artist, everything you produce is "art"; it should be referred to as "work". Which got me thinking about the concept of writing as "work", as opposed to something you might do strictly for pleasure or relaxation.

A lot of people say, "I love to write" or "I enjoy writing". I'm not sure that I do. Feeling the initial spark for a piece is great, and I often commit the cardinal sin of falling in love with one of my own metaphors or the sound of a line, etc. But enjoy the process, not so much. It is work, sometimes very frustrating work, as my reach exceeds my grasp and I often see that original spark fizzling out on the page. And then there's the obsessive process of revision. Even when I've gotten a poem as far as I can take it, the ensuing relief of accomplishment is frequently accompanied by the phenomenon I call "post-poem depression", where all seems "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable".

Why, then? I guess because I do desire the satisfaction of creating something from nothing, like successfully assembling a 1,000 piece puzzle when you've lost the lid to the box and don't know at the beginning whether it's supposed to be a calico kitten or the Space Needle. Even if it has all been mostly said before, poetry still feels like a natural and almost necessary way to engage the world.

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My

I went to Woodland Park Zoo today with my mom and dad, and we had a wonderful time. I'm ambivalent about zoos, because on one hand, I love watching the beauty and behavior of the animals, but on the other hand, why should wild things be caged for my amusement? But every time I go to this zoo, there's a new and improved, wilder habitat for someone. This time, the jaguar has an amazing new enclosure with tons of running water, trees, bushes, and little rock dens to curl up in. I swear that cat's digs are larger than the lot my house is on. The lemurs and the monkeys have a spiffy new open-air environment too. It may not be perfect, but it's an immense improvement on the old-style zoo reality of concrete rooms with bars on.

We went specifically today to see the two Sumatran tiger cubs, about three months old now and thirty pounds apiece. Cute as buttons, with enormous paws. There are only 400-500 Sumatran tigers left in the wild; they're the smallest of the tigers, and have white "false eye" spots on the backs of their dark ears. These cubs are named Langka (LONG-ka), Indonesian for "rare", and Manis (Maw-NEES), Indonesian for "sweet." They were awake when we got there, bouncing all over and biting everything in their vicinity, including their mother. She took it pretty well, but didn't hesitate to clomp them in the head with her paw when they went too far. I don't know if it was a dominance thing or what, but one cub consistently ran roughshod over and gnawed on his brother or his mom, while the other cub seemed to think that trees and sticks were the enemy to be subdued. They're pretty lively on their feet, but don't have perfect dexterity yet; one of them fell off a log about four feet above the ground; he sat there thinking about that for about 30 seconds before getting up and loping off to attack his brother, who was injudiciously lying with his belly exposed.

Another highlight was listening to the lions and tigers roar, which they did quite a bit of today (apparently zoo animals tend to be more active in the colder winter weather). It actually scared some of the little kids, which isn't surprising. It provided me with a delightful frisson down the spine, but if I were out in the wild in their natural environment, it wouldn't have been so delightful. One small boy seemed more concerned with the tiger; he looked up at this massive animal, (to whom "regal" and "imposing" don't do justice and who looked like he would eat you as soon as look at you), and said, "Daddy, he doesn't have any friends."

The tropical aviary is always wonderful (and warm); we saw turquoise tanagers, yellow-rumped caciques, kiskadees, peruvian pigeons, blue-crowned mot-mots, and a sun bittern. I conversed a bit with a kiskadee and a cacique, and suffered an aerial bombardment from a mot-mot (missed my head, got my coat).

The so-called "Elephant Barn" is an impressive structure after the manner of a Thai temple, I believe. We were watching mother and baby (relatively speaking) elephant eat their evening ration of hay when we saw another trunk snaking in through a gap in the doorway leading to an adjacent isolation room. I assume this elephant had also been fed, but she was covertly abstracting hay from the adjoining room; she got through quite a bit of it, too. I guess "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" isn't a human-specific idiom.

The Longest Night

I've been in a blue funk lately ... it's not just the short days. Everything I think and do right now is colored by the fact that a good friend of ours is dying of cancer. Too young -- only 59. He likely won't last the night; surely not the week. It's too late to say goodbye, formally -- we've visited all through the months, but he's slipped into a coma now, completely unresponsive, and even his wonderful wife of 35 years is leaving him alone so he can finish leaving.

So we sat and visited with her this evening, drinking tea and eating the apple cake she made for us, even in the middle of all this ... I can only aspire to that kind of grace. We looked at their wedding pictures, and she talked about her plans for after the funeral; she's going to get an Amtrak pass and travel all over the country to visit friends ... sort of a pilgrimage, sort of a transition into the rest of her life, which I think is really wise. He helped her plan the trip; I can't even imagine.

The whole time we were there tonight, we could hear and see him breathing upstairs -- the baby monitor had red lights that adjusted according to the noise level; two lights, one light.

Things On My Kitchen Counter That Shouldn't Be There (in which we discover that Jennifer is a bit of a slob and has nothing more interesting today)

1. A beer glass with the Big Sky "Moose Drool" logo (empty)
2. Two teabag wrappers for green tea with lemongrass
3. The Fall/Winter issue of the National Poetry Review
4. A small piece of tinfoil
5. A flyer for Lavender Fields Day Spa on San Juan island, printed on shimmery lavender paper (I think this came out of a book).
6. A 20 oz. package of mixed beans for soup (Hurst's HamBeens brand)
7. Three scraps of paper with early drafts of poems on one side, and on the other sides (respectively): A note reminding me that Scott's truck has both the left and center rear brake lights burnt out; words for a poem in progress -- plucking out, quill, wingspan, sparkle, topple; a shopping list for chicken broth, green peppers and carrots.
8. A silver hair-claw with tiny aurora borealis crystals
9. My camera
10. A blue plastic breadbag clasp I absent-mindedly broke into five pieces.
11. The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America

The Joy of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.



By Wislawa Szymborska
From "No End of Fun", 1967
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

Orange Poem

Ok, here's my entry in the Great Orange Challenge of '04:


Visiting Orange

You'll never write a poem about this place,
you say, coaxing maraschino stems to knot
with your tongue. Nothing rhymes with orange.

I could try to explain why I no longer rhyme,
but we've moved on past the enormity of Wal-Mart
on the former outskirts to post mortem the marriage

of your second cousin fifty miles north of here,
the one with the cows, whose wife finally left him
with permanent moons from her flawless french nails.

We shake up the icemelt in our glasses, quote
our old code for romantic disaster, That's love,
American style, almost in unison with yesterday:

little rebels in red Nehru jackets,
suicide blonde from the same bottle
in a bouffant hairdo hometown

far too small to let us get away with drinking here.
Now you mouth a hot pink Sock it to me every time
the barman idles by with another happy hour Tootie Fruity.

I tell you a guy named Richard Hugo wrote poems
about places like this -- he said, Leave in a flashy car
and wave goodbye. You laugh and wave goodbye

to the bar halfway down Henderson as we weave
through last season's lace of morning glory
and petunia frizzled down from iron baskets

just in time to grab our Junior Mints
for a revival of Lawrence of Arabia
at the three-dollar theater.

After, we sit silent twenty minutes
in the muddled neon sunset flooding
from Ed Flaherty's topless bar.

Desert has filled up our mouths,
wider than memory measured it,
nothing there to hide behind.

The End of the Third Age...

...and the end of an era. Ok, what a geek, but I'm a bit melancholy. The extended edition of Return of the King comes out today, with an extra hour of footage, which is cool, but leaves me with nothing to look forward to (except maybe The Hobbit, but that's a big if). I've always loved Tolkien, dearth of strong female characters notwithstanding, and I think Peter Jackson et al. did an amazing job with the film adaptations. Of course, there are exceptions ... I'd like to personally hunt down and slap whoever decided to have Denethor go over the edge of Minas Tirith in a blaze of glory (well, just a blaze really). Same goes for Legolas' surfer dude antics. I understood about Tom Bombadil, but still think they should have tackled the Scouring of the Shire. The Ents weren't quite right, and Faramir wasn't right at all. I could sit and nitpick all day, but on the other hand we have the spectacular set/costume design and cinematography, the lighting of the beacons, the score, just about everything at Bag End and Edoras, an almost flawless cast, the Balrog and Gollum, and the fact that they didn't screw up the end. I enjoyed the films thoroughly, and I'm sad there's no more to come. At least I'll finally get to find out what happened to the horses.

Dreaming of Poets

There must be something in the night air ... see Steve Mueske's blog entry (and Didi Menendez's comments) for a weird-whichever-way-you-slice-it dream synchronicity.

And now I'm doing it ... my old teacher, Jim Mitsui, appeared the other night in conversation with three other Asian-American poets. Blue poppies (Meconopsis) were blooming. He said, "As we mature as poets, we should try to achieve, not better answers, but better questions." Honestly. So I'm thinking that over.

In a more surreal vein, last night I visited Paul Guest in a basement studio apartment with midnight blue formica countertops. The walls were adorned with art in the form of blackboards with lines of cursive writing (some crossed out), and a collage comprised of photos of color-film packaging with a functional irising light aperture in the center. Someone was telling an anecdote about a man driving a big old burgundy Cadillac convertible, who came to grief (along with his small sienna-and-white dog) when he had to stop suddenly. I don't know what to do with all that, but it was interesting.

Telling my dreams seems narcissistic, but I guess that's sort of the point of blogging.

The Importance of Being Orange

Didi Menendez (MiPO) has a great contest/challenge/exercise posted on her blog (December 1st entry), as follows:

Write A Poem - Win a prize
Write a poem using all of these 12 words/phrases

Place the poem on your blog and leave me a note so I can go read it. "Orange" should be in the title. I will give a $25 amazon.com gift certificate for the best one. Please note that writers over at the poetry board are also participating. Deadline: December 20th. Good luck and have fun.

1- Nehru Jacket
2- bouffant hairdo
3- sock it to me
4- Love American Style
5- Ed
6- french nails
7- Lawrence of Arabia
8- rebels
9- suicide
10-topless bar
11- orange
12- tooty fruity

****************

Most of these words have more urban/pop culture associations than my usual poetic fodder, so this will be good for me ... broadening to the mind and all that rot. I'll post whatever I come up with. And I'd love to see what others create from the same material (hint).