Road Trip Day 3: Book Festival and Party

After ten years or so, co-emceeing the poetry corner at the LA Times Festival of Books is fairly routine. Wake up, show up, set up, keep track of who's next and track them down if necessary. Buy books at Small World Book's tent. Sometimes the work keeps you from listening to the poetry, but given that it lasts all day, the words and poets can run together without time away from the tent, so I try to listen to a few carefully before I run off to check for the next poet, break in the green room, etc. The line up on April 26th was strong, so catching as much as I could became a challenge. Mark Doty, always a strong reader, began the day and he brought us a terrific early crowd that seemed to sustain itself throughout the day. Here's the whole list:

Mark Doty
Fire to Fire

Sholeh Wolpe
Rooftops of Tehran

Eloise Klein Healy & Elizabeth Bradfield
The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho & Interpretive Work: Poems

Albert Goldbarth
The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007

Brian Tracy
Driving with Dante

David St. John
The Face: A Novella in Verse

Jean Valentine
Little Boat

Marvin Bell
Mars Being Red

Christopher Buckley
Flying Backbone: The Georgia O'Keeffe Poems

Sarah Maclay and Charles Hood
The White Bride and Rio de Dios

Susan McCabe
Descartes’ Nightmare

Lynne Thompson
Beg No Pardon

Jennifer Kwan Dobbs
Paper Pavilion

Tony Barnstone
The Golem of Los Angeles

Catherine Daly and Stuart Dischell
Locket and Backwards Days

Mark, David St. John, Marvin Bell, Chris Buckley, Shole Wolpe, Jean Valentine (quietly), Stuart, and Eloise were all high points on an unusually strong list. My favorite moment, though, was when Albert Goldbarth read among the most masterful complaints in the history of letters, I believe, in his diatribe against the obligatory post-reading Thai restaurant meal. I was laughing, crying, and starving for a chili-cheese burger with a side of onion rings all at the same time. Tony Barnstone's work surprised me most, and he'll be in my classes next year, for sure.

Later, Sholeh and Tony hosted a party in Barry and Sholeh's loft downtown. The place was lovely, the conversation excellent and spiced with laughter, and the Persian cuisine was wonderful. Writers from both days attended, and Tony even brought along a little Hollywood, as Kimberly Oja (an OC regular) showed up. I told Elena that I felt a little out of place, outclassed, Fresno boy that I continue to be, but truly the gathering was warm and I was happy to cab Stuart and Jill Bialosky back to their hotel around midnight, and then the 405 back to the Hacienda.

Road Trip, Day 2, plus meme

Friday in LA was soft, warm, no plans or obligations. Just a few possibilities that never came to pass. I did the California thing--shopped in an upscale mall built no doubt on reclaimed toxic ground next to the refinery. Wine and a blazer. That's what I bought. Then I explored El Segundo, which merited all of that second as the cafe I stopped in for caffeine blared a soap opera. The walk was good. The beach was unwelcoming unless you were in an RV. The hotel lunch wasn't bad, a Mexican buffet of sorts, but the seafood soup was a very pleasant surprise. Just killing time until the evening.

The LA Times Book Awards ceremony was, as usual, long, but pleasant enough. I sat with Elena and fellow "Fresno Poet" and friend David St. John and his lovely daughter. You can check out the winners here, if you're interested. I was mostly interested in poetry, and Stanley Plumly won that for Old Heart: Poems among many worthy nominees this year (Albert Goldbarth, Marvin Bell, Jean Valentine, and Elaine Equii). The afterparty was lavish as usual, with chocolate fountains and food stations that featured lobster farfarelle and Korean barbecue shortribs and sushi and other savory items. We ate and drank, ate and drank, and talked into the evening. Stuart Dischell was also there, old brother in the word, another transplant to the south, and Albert was delightfully witty, as usual. The evening passed quickly into memory and I made it back to the Hacienda early enough to rest up for the book festival.

Because this is shorter, I'm going to take care of some meme nonsense because Chryss and Amy E. said I have to.

Here are the rules:
A) The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
B) Each player answers the questions about himself or herself.
C) At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1) Ten years ago I was...
finishing my PhD, which I defended the same day the Santa Barbara pier caught fire. Driving back from LAX, I saw it burn fiercely and bright, probably all that creosote, but I thought from some distance it was all of downtown.

2) Five things on today's to-do list:
Lunch (Sonia's Cuban) with Carson and Taylor, Toby's rec letter, proof poems for Chattahoochee Review, syllabus for tomorrow, house show (Honest A's reunion cf. Carson above) tonight.

3) Things I'd do if I were a billionaire:
Hmmm. Are supermodels things? Bad joke, but really, don't you have to be some kind of asshole to hoard that much money? I'd like to think I wouldn't keep that much. I'd have to start some kind of foundation divided between environmental and human rights concerns that would keep me from every accumulating that much money.

4) Three bad habits:
Hmmm. 1) I procrastinate. I'll do the other two later.

5) Five places I've lived:
Here (Valdosta), there (Fresno), Berkeley, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Salt Lake City, Utah. (That's six, but I'm still down two bad habits, and maybe Fresno counts as one of my bad habit[at]s?)

6) Six jobs I've had in my life:
Custodian, Snack Bar slave, Statistical Clerk (US Forest Service), Life Insurance Agent, High School Teacher, College Professor. (Be honest, guys, how many of you typed "blow" and then erased it.)

I'll tag Mike and Liz and John and all of my Myspace friends.

Poetry Worth Reading: New Blog Announcement

John Guzlowski and I are starting a new blog called Poetry Worth Reading. The point is to write about poetry we like. Period. I hope you'll check it out from tome to tome.

Coincidence and Photography: Lost and Found

I took some pictures of a large caterpillar that has cocooned itself over our doorway, a kind of threshold over a threshold, silk above wood and aluminum. I can't find the disk with the photos to post, so instead of blogging about autumn yesterday, I decided to get some work done gathering publication information for the acknowledgments page of my forthcoming chapbook, Other Medicines, coming out in January from Redbone press.

Two of the poems were commissioned (thanks to the efforts of Patsy Hicks) by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for photographic exhibitions, so I had to look up titles and dates. One of the poems was for an exhibit titled An Eclectic Focus: Photographs from the Vernon Collection. Leonard Vernon and his (then) recently late wife Marjorie had collected thousands of photographs from 1840 to the contemporary era, and Leonard attended the reading on August 28, 1999, to listen to poems written in response to his collection. David Oliveira, Barry Spacks, Chryss Yost, and I read our poetic responses as visitors walked around and viewed the photographs, some with our poems beside them. Leonard Vernon was wonderful at this event, and it was clear how much for him the exhibit and our poems in response connected him with Marjorie. He smiled and spoke so fondly of her and of their collecting. I had the feeling that for him this exhibition was not about the pride of owning rare, often very famous work. The exhibition was about their love, and about their time together finding beauty. She lives on through this collection. They live on.

I was saddened to learn yesterday that Leonard Vernon had died the previous day, October 30th, his threshold to cross, I hope, back to Marjorie.

For me it also brought back warm memories of dear friends, of our poems and our work together, of an event that showed how art makes living possible.

Wall Shadow

—after a photograph by Josef Sudek (from the Vernon Collection)

A sign above the avenue is blank.
A window pulls the dark across its pane.
A single figure leans beneath the sign.
Everyone who should be here is gone.
The cobbles bear our shadows down the lane.
The grey walls grind the coruscating moon.
Something else was written on the sign:
“Everyone who should be here is gone.”
Moonlight pools beneath the figure’s robes.
The avenue keeps busy with its cracks.
The pipes bear out the effluent of hope.
Everyone who should be here is gone.
A window pulls the dark across its pane.
The cobbles bear these shadows down the lane.

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.

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.)

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.