What begins in Pixley and ends in Zin

After driving up PCH's foggy ribbon to Santa Barbara, I had the pleasure of the company of dear friends whom I knew the five years I lived in Santa Barbara. I arrived at the Sandman Motel, which turned out to be the hotel my old apt. complex put my son Ian and me in when they were doing some work. I called George and Amy, who were entertaining Amy's folks. They invited me over for a nice risotto and a yummy Rhone blend and amazing cheese and five dogs competing for attention and I had a wonderful time. Amy's parents are fun to be around, adventurous and lively. It was a quick evening, though, as I arrived later than I expected, and I needed sleep.

Monday morning I checked out and drove to Lompoc to see my friend Christopher Buckley, who'd just received a Guggenheim. We met at a wonderful Laotian/Thai restaurant, Suvann's, which serves all the usual dishes, but they make and serve a homemade pork and lemon grass sausage that's wonderful spicy and slightly sweet, like your lover's earlobe. We ate and talked Poetolitics, then went to his backyard to continue and philosophize over a delightful and inexpensive wine from Pixley, of all places. The marketing writing on the back was effusive, praising the "breath-taking central valley" (I might have used the term "choking," but then again I wouldn't have got the job) and the winery's environmentally friendly practices (When have you not thought of Pixley and environmentally friendly in the same sentence?). Not bad for a two-buck cab franc from an outlet store--a little roasted like old-style zin, but enough clove on the palate to make things interesting. Chris was great and I we talked for several hours about everything from cats to catharsis. My only regret was that Nadia, Chris' wife, was at work. Hummingbirds sipped sugar water. The sky was blue, white where the clouds smeared.

Tomorrow I'm journeying home to sweet Amy, but this trip will continue to Monday night in SB and on to Turley and Fresno and family and dear, dear Peter Everwine, when I'm finally, finally home.

On the Road, PT 1 LA

Writing from Fresno today, after a long weekend in LA at the book festival working the poetry corner and a fine day and evening with wonderful friends in the Santa Barbara area.

The book festival brought writers and readers from all over the southland, and that it continues to feature a venue devoted entirely to poetry is what keeps me going back every year. Highlights this year included David St. John, Mark Doty, Erin Belieu, a tribute to Bert Meyers, Charles Harper Webb, Jane Miller and Jane Mead, old friend Richard Beban, and many others. The only problem with working the corner is that it makes attending other events difficult. I missed out on a pre-teen fantasy when I missed Tina Louise's reading of her new children's book, though, I was always a Mary Ann (Dawn Wells) fan, to be honest. On the plus side, I missed out on Christopher Hitchens' boorish tantrums. Apparently, he calls security if someone asks a question he doesn't like. He must have missed the first amendment question on his citizenship test. At any rate, the poetry winner, Frederick Seidel wasn't there, so we pressed on. The lack of winners at the award ceremony perhaps made the after celebration a bit more muted, but since I was with my dear, wise friend Margaret, I had a delightful evening; she helps me see through my self-blindness. My love, Amy, adores her as well (We missed you, Amy). Friend and fellow poet and emcee Elena Karina Byrne (who should have been reading) was an ever-smiling spirit-being organizing the tent area, and Noah Blaustein dropped in to help us find good restaurants to eat and dine and tell stories in. His wife, Cristina, is lovely as ever, and I finally met their new daughter, Siena, happy and intelligent well beyond her 10 months. Paul Willis, Phil Taggart, and Jackson Wheeler, all old friends, also dropped in.

In LA, I stayed in the Tradewind Adventurer's motel in Inglewood on Century Blvd, near Hollywood Park. Strange place to be in. Jets pour noise over, white noise syrup, but the courtyard was peaceful otherwise and filled with travelers, many backpackers from Europe, so I enjoyed the international atmosphere. Not the cleanest place, but if you've backpacked Europe and Asia, it'll do, it's cheap, and it's near the 405. The nearby Indian restaurant on Century and La Brea boasts at its grand opening that it serves the best Indian cuisine in LA. It doesn't, but it was fine; it's not often that I find chicken makhani on a lunch buffet, and the naan was served fresh, crispy, and hot.

Tomorrow, Santa Barbara, Wine, and Fresno in the "breath-taking central valley."

John Guzlowski's poetry instead of "Alberto Gonzales still has a job?"

John Guzlowski's new book, Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Press, 2007) is a searing and unsentimental consideration of the lives and deaths of his parents, who survived imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps in Poland during World War II and who subsequently moved to Chicago to start a new life after the war. John doesn't make the mistake of trying to pen his subjects larger than life, make them heroes; his parents are average people, farmers, burdened by poverty and their own character flaws and idiosyncrasies, survivors permanently scarred by their experiences.

His writing is deft and luminous, intimate without being invasive, and fearless in his exploration of events that are still painful in our collective historical memory. The book moves in reverse chronology from his parents' deaths through their time in the camps toward their childhoods, when "he imagined he would always stay on his aunt's small farm" and "[s]he loved picking mushrooms in the spring" and " . . . loved to sing." The poems are appropriately dark, many even hopeless, but the book provokes a greater sense of hope in its decision to take the responsibility that comes from choosing to witness and to speak.

Why My Mother Stayed with My Father

She knew he was worthless the first time
she saw him in the camps: his blind eye,
his small size, the way his clothes carried
the smell of the dead men who wore them before.

In America she learned he couldn't fix a leak
or drive a nail straight. He knew nothing
about the world, the way the planets moved,
the tides. The moon was just a hole in the sky,

electricity a mystery as great as death.
The first time lightning shorted the fuses,
he fell to his knees and prayed to Blessed Mary
to bring back the miracle of light and lamps.

He was a drunk, too. Some Fridays he drank
his check away as soon as he left work.
When she'd see him stagger, she'd knock him down
and kick him till he wept. He couldn't crawl away.

He was too embarrassed. Sober, he'd beg
in the bars on Division Street for food or rent
until even the drunks and bartenders
took pity on this dumb polack.

My father was like that, but he stayed
with her through the madness in the camps
when she searched among the dead for her sister,
and he stayed when it came back in America.

Maybe this was why my mother stayed.
She knew only a man worthless as mud,
worthless as a broken dog would suffer
with her through all of her sorrow.

John lives here in Valdosta, recently retired from Eastern Illinois University. We have coffee and compare poems. I'm lucky he's here. And as for the rest of the post title, just be glad you were spared the obvious rant.

Writer's Block

I'm sitting in my office at VSU, listening to Tom Waits, thinking about my friend Bob Hicok at Virginia Tech. I was teaching his poems to my students yesterday, distracted with worry, so I read them badly. Sorry, Bob. Such tragedy hits us all, wakes us to the fact that, every day, we deal with trouble, with stress, with human beings, some of whom are broken or breaking. Sometimes, the crush of school puts them out, and they wander off to find work or solace elsewhere, some bar, some other city. To hear that the shooter was an English major, frankly, surprised me at first, and then it didn't. Young writers are given to violence as a way to end things in their stories. It's something I have to caution against because it's almost always too easy an ending, like the dream--wake up, everything's ok!-- and yet dwelling on violence is supposed to be a sign of creativity, so some experts say. It never surprises me when I read it in the work of beginners. But I do worry about my students when I read their writing and I know it's too real. I only hope that getting it out helps get it outside so they can look at it. So they can shape it and feel a kind of control over it once it's outside. Craft compels this. Craft is control, is self-control, after the creative/destructive blurting that most art begins as.

The media are another kind of control. Instant blame. Instant expertise. Instant mythology. Fear, fear, fear. I watched some of it, the endless what-they-should've-done-ing that pretends we don't live in a country that loves guns more than we love civility. All I can do is push for civility, keep my door open anyway, and know that hiding in my office or asking the University President to hire more people with guns isn't going to make a difference. You put 10,000 people together in our gun-addled culture, someone's gonna go off. Once when I was visiting Fresno about ten years ago, a car full of young men, teenagers, pulled away from my parents' neighbor's house. Kid riding shotgun pointed his finger at me as they rode past, said, "pop, pop, pop." Laughed. This is a sad, simple, awful story, one that will be told again, I'm afraid, soon enough. Pop, pop, pop. But my door is still open.

On the death of anyone's child

For a parent, the loss of one's child is unimaginable, and yet a constant, nagging fear, something you live with by ignoring it the way you ignore your refrigerator's hum. When a friend loses a child, all that noise awakens into magnified presence, yet one is left speechless, astonied, as they used to say--an archaism, but one that fits the mouth better than any other word I can think of at the moment. When the child has taken his or her own life, the speechlessness itself magnifies. What can one possibly say? What question can one possibly ask that would find a satisfactory or consoling answer? Explanation palls. Reason fails.

What I can do is love my own children, Elizabeth and Ian, and be grateful that I can still tell them so.

What I can do is remember Margaret Ann blossoming into her mother's living room briefly, smiling, politely helloing and furtively darting into her bedroom to escape the tiresome adults, as teens do. Beautiful, beautiful smile. . . .

Poetry , J. Allyn Rosser

J. Allyn Rosser read her poetry here last night. She read over the squeaking chairs in the upstairs auditorium of the science building. Since the building is fairly new, one supposes the squeaks were included as part of the purchase price, perhaps to keep the students awake, perhaps to keep the professor awake.

She was a pleasure to host, magnanimous with her energy, and she engaged students here with openness and appreciation. We talked at length about poets we knew, poetry we liked, and, since I was only distantly familiar with her work, it was a pleasure both to get to know her poetry and her ideas about it. I liked her very much, in short. At the reading, her poems ranged from portentous and ambitious ("The World's Brain") to observant and witty and true ("Self Pith"). I only wish I hadn't been getting over a virus, since it limited my own energies for the visit. Several of us--Andrea, Kaleb, Andy, Joel, and Amy--went out to dinner and drinks after at the Cafe Bleu (2 for 1 vino), and Jill (as she prefers to be called; Allyn honors a poet for whom she was named who died to young) talked with us about poetry and music and admired Kaleb's new tattoo to cap off a delightful evening. I wish her safe journeys as she makes a pilgrimage to Savannah to visit the grave of Johnny Mercer.

Congratulations also to my dear friend Christopher Buckley (the poet, not the novelist) for his Guggenheim fellowship.

(Oh, and click Andrea's link to hear her band and her lovely voice, recently voted one of Myspace's top 25 band's by Rolling Stone.)

List Memoir: very early memories

night, crib, looking up--dim, still shapes (no words in my head then so make your eyes blur all this)

running gleefully down the plastic-shrouded hall in footy pajamas toward mom I'm so proud of you*

hands cupping the extruded rear tail light of a '58 buick making a tunnel to my face it's cold it's cold and so red

in the arms of an uncle I watch the face of an old clock, christmas tree lights haloing through the angel hair#

first snow, Fresno, 1962, so new I squeak and my feet sink through to the green grass--mom' and dad's push in white

*My mother much later confirmed this memory, shrouds because she was painting, proud because I hadn't wet the bed that night.
# Clock from 1918 Sears and Roebucks catalog.

Dinner with friends, Panthers, and a Fisk follow-up

Amy and I had the pleasure of dining with our friends the Mostels this weekend at their home in North Florida, not far from here. The house is wondrous--a spatious, high-ceilinged metal building housing all kinds and eras of art (Toby and Aileen are both artists, as well) and artifacts from their years in Manhattan and Maine, as well as more recent productions and acquisitions, on fifteen acres or so boasting a three-alligator pond and snakes aplenty. They're wonderfully warm and generous people and they've helped make the transition to life in South Georgia easier. And Toby's a fine cook, so I don't mind taking a good bottle of Brunello or Cab there to share (this time a fragrant 96 Casanova di Neri I found locally at a closeout price). The large open front area of the house really belongs to Albert, Toby's chattering parrot, who tolerates the cockatiels and enjoys Toby's devoted attention. Albert loves to listen to him sing and play the two Steinways that sit side-by-side there, and he lets the rest of us hang out as long as we abide his commentary.

We spoke of politics and opera. Well, Toby spoke of opera at length, with Aileen adding an anecdote about a particularly moving final performance by Joan Sutherland at the Met. At any rate, Amy and I listened, since our arcane pop sensibilities couldn't add much here, but we enjoyed listening to stories about opera's golden era, looking at photos of the magnificent staging of Billy Budd.

Finally they also spoke of their encounter with a rare Florida panther. Aileen walks her four dogs, each named after some article of luggage (Trunk, Valise, etc.), every evening. Last week, the dogs went nuts off a scent. A deer caught in a fence was strangling itself, and Aileen tried to help free it, but couldn't before it collapsed and died. Meanwhile, the dogs went into hiding. After failing to free the deer, Aileen looked for Toby to help disentangle the dead deer. He walked down to examine the situation, watched a nearly nine-foot panther saunter away up the roadway, looking back over its shoulder at the prey and the man. Later that week, the dogs treed a panther cub on the property. Whether this is a true panther or a wandering cougar transplanted in a program to expand the gene pool, it ain't supposed to be in these parts. A big cat on their property. We talked about how frightening it is. We talked about how promising it is.

Fisk update: His own article on his visits to Cairo and Valdosta, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2387832.ece

Robert Fisk in Enemy Territory

Syria? Iran? Fallujah? No, Fisk brought his realist vision of journalism to Valdosta, Georgia, smack dab in the middle of conservative, biblebelt America, where he prodded local students and progressives to think rationally about the problems of the Middle East--that is, to consider multiple points of view and to avoid drinking the ideological officialese koolaid we get from the minions in the gaggle who spend all their time cultivating "relationships" with all the paid liars, um, "officials."

Among many fine points in his two-hour talk, he says mainstream journalists have stopped asking why things are the way they are, distracted as they are by the how. How those 19 pilots managed to fly those planes into the WTC was covered endlessly. Why? Well, Alan Dershowitz proclaimed the very question an act of terrorism and called Fisk an anti-Semite for asking it (Fisk has it on tape). But he was in the air on the phone to his editor when 9.11 happened, and confessed to profiling passengers on the plane and passing along his news and observations to the pilot as events unfolded. He had interviewed bin Laden three times, had heard him say directly that he was out to make America a "shadow of itself" and knew who was likely behind it. But more important than his initial fearfull response was his desire to analyze all the connections and reasons this happened. He knows the history of the Middle East. He lives there, in Lebanon. He knows that our folly in Iraq is merely a repeat of the British folly there after WWI. He knew before it happened that the Lebanon-Israeli war this past summer was to be started by a kidnapping of an IDF soldier. He knows the players and the angles and the reality of the Middle East, that Israel is involved in an occupation regardless of what you call it, that Syria was (and still is) a dangerous presence in Lebanon, and that we have very little reason to fear Iran. But this is all out there. Read his words. He's an outstanding, lucid writer in addition to being a truthseeker.

If I have anything to say at all, it's merely that he isn't the liberal crackpot gadfly he's portrayed as in the conservative and even mainstream media. He's merely a realist, furious that people keep blowing each other up, someone who cheered Syria's abandonment of Lebanon and lamented Israel's incursion into it, someone with friends of all races in all these countries, a man who's seen the carnage close up and who's angry that no one in America or Great Britain wants to see it to think about it or care about the people or the reasoning behind the carnage. He's seen and can elucidate articulately the imperial parallels between America and Britain and Rome. Reuters refused to publish his photos of the initial invasion. They were too graphic, too disrespectful of the dead women and children and old people. Why, asked Fisk, hadn't we been as respectful of their lives?

Influenza Blues and a Birthday Party

A week in bed should be relaxing, but the grippe wrapped its venal tendrils around and among my various alveoli and wouldn't let go. Was well enough today to sort of teach, but it did afford me the excuse I needed to vegetate and watch too many NCAA tournament games. I'm not pulling for anyone but my lungs right now, but I suppose I'd have to claim Florida as the team I want to win now that Winthrop and VCU are out. None of my alma maters (Cal, Fresno State, Utah) are in the mix, so I didn't have to worry about that conflict of disinterest. Amy worked, and, yes, we snuck out to see Lucinda and the HB's, but I generally tried not to spread the epidemiological wealth, as it were. Actually, being able to write archaisms like "as it were" is one reason I started this gig, that and to ultimately begin my list autobiography, which will be my frontal assault on the Creative Nonfiction pseudogenre. Whining done and no wines to wax on about, so it's time to move on to larger matters, as the flu isn't the only thing to choke me up these awful days.

Four years in Iraq and no end in sight.

Happy birthday, Abu Ghraib. Happy Birthday, Mission Accomplished. Happy Birthday, Halliburton (Yes, the presents are all yours). Happy Birthday, WMD. Happy Birthday, dead Iraqi civilians. Happy Birthday, body bags. Happy Birthday, unitary executive power. Happy Birthday, IEDs. Blow out the candles on your yellow cake. Make a wish. Make a wish.

Lucinda Williams w' Heartless Bastards

Pitchfork may feel less than lukewarm about West, the new album, but Lucinda clearly feels it, and if you're lucky enough to hear the new songs laced among your many favorites like "Lake Charles," "Car Wheels," and "Crescent City," they set down like kin among kin, welcome even if they've been rangin' out in the wider world a bit. They pat the dog and rest on the porch just fine. Good stories with wise, direct images of personal heartbreak, loss, and spiritual growth. (The plague of emo-popularity is perhaps making collateral damage of the truly felt, and so I can imagine the Pitchfork reviewer prattling away skeptically after too much MCR and FOB, wishing for something cold and austere--say a Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army boxed set.) The crowd at Tallahassee's Moon, with its fabulous sound system, ate her set up with so much enthusiasm that she played for a full half hour or so after her formal set list concluded with a delicious version of "Joy" as the obligatory encore. She was lovely, her voice clear and curled like a cat around your ankles, and if she wasn't quite home, she knew she was very welcome. The backing band, featuring long-time touring lead guitarist Doug Pettitbone, was tight even if Lucinda had to restart a couple of songs that began off-key or out of tempo (Why else go to live shows?)

BTW: The audience, whether Lucinda knew it or not, was populated by literary stars from FSU and, what--white dwarfs?-- from VSU, including Bob Shacochis, James Kimbrough, Mark Winegartner, and a new colleague here, Deborah Hall.

Heartless Bastards opened, featuring the fearless, soaring vocals of Erika Wennerstrom. She could very well be the answer to the interesting rock what-if question, "What if Grace Slick had sung and played guitar in an alt country band?" She writes well and belts her songs out with passion. She's supported capably by Kevin Vaughn on drums Mike Lamping on the bass. We (Anna, my Amy, and Mike and Carla) were pleased that they accepted Mike's invitation to hang out at Waterworks after, so we chatted about her Dayton roots and Nate Farley while GBV played in the background. A sweet, long night away from Valdosta.

You already know Lucinda, so check out the band she hand picked to open for her.

100 Point Wines

The AWP conference was its usual gathering of hedonists and post-hedonists, writers and wannabe writers and booksellers and publishers and teachers and all forms of imaginative whores for the word. (I include myself.)



Photos: Madison Smartt Bell and Wyn Cooper front the Skylarks with Glen Phillips guesting on guitar. Photo at the bar with Shawna, Andrea, and Amy in front. A visit to the notorious Clermont Lounge followed. The rest are mental.

Ann Hudson with her lovely smile walking into Salon A for my presentation.

Thom Ward lounging on Kurt Brown's bed while we (Amy, Katie Coles, Scott Cairns, Wyn and Shawna) tasted the fine '96 Casanova di Neri Brunello and the divine '90 Ch. Montrose (RP 100 pts.)

Lunar eclipse ghosting through clouds over Atlanta as Amy and I walked back to the car.

Looking for the words

The AWP conference in Atlanta will bring writers from all over the country to the Georgia's sprawling metropolis. While we'll wax on about the how's and why's of writing and argue about the minute politics of publishing and academia, most of us will be looking to reconnect with old friends, find time for a glass of wine, a smooth cigar, a good barroom conversation, a fine meal or two. We'll endure the countless jokes about Peachtree St. and enjoy the warming spring weather and think about what we do, maybe too much. Profligacy will abound and our penumbras will darken the sidewalks late into the night. Much will haunt me from the last Atlanta conference over a decade ago where someone wonderful came into my life and taught me to listen, her smoky voice a lost adventure, her eyes quick, curious, wise. More when I can bear it.

Overtime

or what happens when you don't know what this might be about, what time I'll have to work on it, why it even exists, except that my old friend Barry Spacks started a blog on poetry and I had to sign up to write to him. The title, from an XTC classic, suggests, I hope, eclecticism on the sensual side. I might talk of poems and poetry (that oldest music), new music, or I might just spill "ink" about a damn fine day in the South like today, 74 degrees right now, hawks nesting in the woods behind my house, students frolicking (do people actually frolick any more?) and sunbathing on the lawn in front of VSU.

I suppose a blog would have been useful when I arrived home exhilarated from concerts, like the recent Yo La Tengo collision with the Sun Ra Arkestra in Jacksonville, two forces blowing full speed through an intersection. The crash was spectacular, but somehow I survived.

Califone at The Earl in Atlanta for the Roots and Crowns tour, a show so fine even the muse put her beer down and listened raptly at what Jim could do with a fiddle, what Tim could do with his pen and guitar and cigarette-soft voice, Joe timing chaos, perfect, precise.

Kim Addonizio reading poems, microessays, stories, blowing her harp at the Warehouse in Tallahassee. I still say she's the sexiest poet in America.

Turley strutting fine Zin legs on our glasses when Scott Cairns was in town.

Or I may just blow my top from time to time in this time when common sense seems to have gone on a bender and passed out behind the trash bins in the alley.

Welcome. Now get off line and go change the world.