Happy Easter!

I've just finished a so-so novel called "Best Friends," having been drawn to the book by its title which is significantly better than the book turned out to be. The top cover blurb said, "A valentine to the staying power of women's friendships." That's all it took for me to part with my fourteen bucks. And spend 483 pages waiting for my Valentine. Thank you Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Anyhoo, Clare, the main character, an AIDS doctor, argues a couple of times in the book against Sister Mary Klein's belief that things always turn out okay, that things work for the greater good. Claire doesn't "have that kind of faith," believing herself a "realist" and that tragedy is worthless. I wouldn't argue that things always work out okay OR that tragedy is worthless. Things don't always work out okay. People get sick, people die. Terrible, ugly, wicked things happen. The story (as far as we can see) does not always have a happy, or even bearable, ending.
BUT.
But Easter. The redemption story, God reconciling the world to himself. It doesn't matter if you believe it, it's truth is neither propelled nor hindered by our acceptance, denial or even awareness of it. Without Easter, tragedy IS worthless. Pain and suffering, evil and death are not illusions, they are material realities, but realities that are subject to redemption. And therein lies hope. Easter is how God threw his arms around the world and promised, "It is going to be alright."

Girls noticing boys

"Mommy, why does it seem like boys are more special in this world than girls are?"
As we drove to her after school guitar lesson, my eight year old daughter (my mud princess) who is generously endowed with astute observations expressed frustration with this one.
"What makes you say that?" I tentatively inquired.
"Why do they talk about the 'first woman doctor'? Why did it take so long for a woman to be a doctor? Why is that a big deal? Why are there men's faces on all the money, except for maybe the queen or something? Why does everything seem to be about boys?"
Those simple questions were a reality check for me as I began to try to explain the "whys." She sees both a woman and an African-American male running for president and has no idea that that is the least bit extraordinary. I had to explain to her why it is. She has no idea how many "firsts" preceded this first or that she'll probably be paid significantly less for doing the same work as a boy. But that she should thank her lucky stars because she's still light-years ahead, rights-wise, of every woman who preceded her generation and most of the rest of the women around the world at this moment. Which is good news. Which is bad news. Which is hard to explain to my daughter.

The Tide of March

Melancholy Part 2

Not to obsess or anything, but these unyieldingly leaden, cold, introverted weeks on end have taken their toll. I'm not the only one clawing at the walls and jonesing for spring. A lot of people I know are hanging on by their fingernails.
Today we had temps of over 70 with clear skies and bright sun. I felt like superwoman. On the way back from a meeting today, knowing tomorrow promises rain and falling temps, I hijacked my sweetie and took the very long road home. We had the windows down and music up, winding around the backroads till we ran across Ray's BBQ where we stopped for a late lunch. Need I say "bliss?" However, winter is not finished with us yet so here is another take (see Jan. 22 for "In Praise of Melancholy") on melancholy to cheer us all up as we endure its last hurrah: The Miracle of Melancholia

Post Aftershock

Over eggs and toast at Ernie's diner today, Hayley asked if Libbles was going to have any more kittens. "No, we think she's done." Three kittens, one already spoken for. Famous last words. We got home and discovered kitten #4, 39 hours after her big brother introduced himself. Are we finished NOW?

New Mama

Last night we had a surprise. Only hours after learning our cat's sister who lives down the street had been confirmed pregnant by the vet (as opposed to having a bad case of worms) and therefore surmised our thick around the middle feline probably was too, she dropped two kittens. I now understand the "ow" of "meow" as that was our signal another kitty was about to appear. Libbles had two within an hour. She delivered the placenta and cleaned them up as we got used to the idea our cat ownership had just tripled. Then, today at noon, 12 hrs. after the first kitten emerged, another series of loud, sharp meOWS and another one popped out. Hayley named it "Aftershock."
Anyone want a kitten?

State of Mind

I don't know if this explains it or if I've merely lost mine. But I hope to post again before spring. Of '08.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I meant to post earlier about this film which I'd greatly anticipated for months. Wayne took me for a pre-Valentines Day night out which proved fortuitous since I was so sick on the actual holiday I didn't even know it was Valentines Day. The chocolate covered strawberries I'd saved for the day went to sludge in the fridge and the gifts I'd bought the week prior were weakly handed to my valentine in plastic shopping bags. He hates plastic shopping bags.
Suffice it to say that after almost a full week on the rack (was that really a mattress?), a second week that kept the girls home from school with two snow days and one holiday, and nasty weather that has trapped us indoors I've gotten a little stir crazy. In comparison to Jean-Dominique Bauby's "locked-in syndrome," my life is a rose garden, if currently a frozen one. And as much as I feel I could go mad with cabin fever, I can't imagine being locked inside my own body with only my left eye still functioning. But that's not true: I did imagine it, so convincing was Julian Schnabel's portrayal of Bauby's plight. You can't leave after seeing the movie without feeling tremendous gratitude for your life, your limbs, the physical freedom you take for granted. The ability to kiss your kids' cheeks, to feel your love's hand in your hair.
The film, based on the memoir Bauby tapped out with his one working eyelid in gorgeous prose is visually and philosophically stunning. There seems to be no level of human diminishment from which some measure of beauty and redemption cannot be wrung. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a beautiful film--go see it, especially if you too dwell in a land of long winter and feel the walls are closing in. You can sometimes see the heavens reflected in the pupil of an eye. But only in the eye that's open.

Down with Flu

Four days captive at the Bone Crusher Inn. Will return once I make an escape.

Nature vs. Nurture (or Moses and Your DNA)

And he hewed two tables of stone like unto the first; and Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up unto mount Sinai, as the LORD had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tables of stone. And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. (Exodus 34: 4-7)

If it wasn't bad enough to have bestowed on you the 10 commandments chiseled in stone (the origin of the phrase "you do the math") it must have been daunting to find out that failure to perfectly comply would impact not only your own sorry ass, but also your children's and your children's children and your children's children's children (the origin of multiplication tables.) Having been expelled from the garden before we passed GO and in the knowledge of subsequent generations' ingenious variations on a theme (death,) this information could conceivably have struck one, in the moment, as redundant.

A few millenium later we were rescued by the notion of tabula rasa, that we arrive as blank slates and have perfect freedom to chisel whatever we want to upon them. We author our own souls. This idea endured until the rise of the nature (innate qualities/DNA) vs. nurture (environment) debate where it was finally determined that these two influences work together to form us and that both contribute to the state of our health, abilities, dispositions and talents. While our genes ("genes as fate") determine such things as eye color, personality and whether or not we'll ever excel at the tango, we know our DNA can be altered by such things as exposure to radiation and alterations in the environment of the womb.

What we are now finding, as Ethan Watters writes in "DNA Is Not Destiny":

"a growing body of evidence suggesting that the epigenic [chemical switches and markers that help switch on or off the expression of particular genes] changes wrought by one's diet, behavior, or surroundings can work their way into the germ line and echo far into the future. Put simply, and as bizarre as it may sound, what you eat or smoke today could affect the health an behavior of your great-grandchildren."

He then quotes Randy Jirtle of Duke University (whose experiments in 2000 with agouti mice lead to this discovery,) "Epigenics is proving we have some responsibility for the integrity of our genome. Before, genes predetermined outcomes. Now everything we do...can effect our gene expression and that of future generations. Epigenics introduces the concept of free will into our idea of genetics."

It appears now that although our slates do not come blank, we do, indeed, write on them. And what we write will not only make a difference in our own lives, but for generations to come. We will bless our offspring or curse them. Perhaps if we could find the exact spot on Mt. Sinai where Moses stood we might find someone had traced a double helix in the sand.

Reprieve

Brain Freeze

Sometimes the idea of putting something new on paper seems as impossible as suddenly speaking fluent Mandarin. How do I write? I look at something I've written in the past and wonder where did that come from? Nothing inspires. Perhaps it's because I'm in the thick of hibernation season and my thoughts, rather than being coaxed out by the luxury of weather enforced seclusion, are on strike for a warm ray of sun. That, and the raging sore throat that has had me working in my pjs for the last two days, my throat feeling like it's been raked by the claws of a mad cat. It seems the whole world has contracted to the point it could fit on the head of a pin. I'm even bored of reading (that is a VERY bad sign) and it's only the first day of February. Note to self: next trip in for provisions, buy travel mags!

For those headed to AWP

Stop by the Packingtown Review table at the AWP Bookfair in NYC (January 30 – February 2). They are assigned table # 513 in “Americas Hall II” at the Hilton, which you can access from the third floor. The inaugural issue is due out in November and since they do not yet have a journal to distribute they are going to display my poem, "Memory of Water" at their table as well as hand out copies of it. So if you are going to AWP, please go by and pick up a copy (and tell the editors, Tasha Fouts & Snezana Zabic, hello for me!)

In Praise of Melancholy

If you've been subjected to the same interminable run of dreary, lead sky days as we have here in Missouri, read this and relish your seasonally enhanced gloom. Who says we have to be happy?

Eric G. Wilson writes,"American happiness is a temptation, one to which I've succumbed on several occasions. More than once I've grown weary of the pervasive gloom of my soul. Like millions of other Americans, I have tried to flee the sadness, attempted to escape, by any means possible, the weight, the fatigue, the fret. Let's be serious: Life, in any form, is terribly and irredeemably hard. Why shouldn't we all scurry from the heartache in the most superficial ways possible, through BlackBerrys and Lexapro and liposuction? Why shouldn't we bask in the gaudy glow of the pervasive American dream? What's lost in this collective stupor? What's wrong, finally, with wanting nothing but bliss?

At the behest of well-meaning friends, I have purchased books on how to be happy. I have tried to turn my chronic scowl into a bright smile. I have attempted to become more active, to get out of my dark house and away from my somber books and participate in the world of meaningful action. I have taken up jogging, the Latin language, and the chair of a university English department. I have fostered the drive to succeed in my career. I have bought an insurance policy, a PalmPilot, and a cellphone. I have taken an interest in Thanksgiving and Christmas, in keeping my hair trimmed short, and in meticulously ironing my clothes. I have viewed Doris Day and Frank Capra movies. I have feigned interest in the health of others. I have dropped into the habit of saying "great" and "wonderful" as much as possible. I have pretended to take seriously certain good causes designed to make the world a better place. I have contemplated getting a dog. I have started eating salads. I have tried to discipline myself in nodding knowingly. I have tried to be mindful of others but ended up pissed as hell. I have written a book on the hard-earned optimism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I have undertaken yoga. I have stopped yoga and gone into tai chi. I have thought of going to psychiatrists and getting some drugs. I have quit all of this and then started again and then once more quit. Now I plan to stay quit. The road to hell is paved with happy plans.

My basic instinct is toward melancholia — a state I must nourish. In fostering my essential nature, I'm trying to live according to what I see as my deep calling. Granted, it's difficult at times to hold hard to this vocation, this labor in the fields of sadness. But I realize somewhere in the core of my bones that I was born to the blues."

Read an except from his book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, being published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux here.

Artrageous Fridays

This is the poster I designed for Columbia's quarterly art crawl. Our cool little town boasts an event that:
"blends a classic gallery crawl with a quirky downtown festival" wherein "local galleries and downtown businesses merge to highlight artists’ talents and the city’s quirky, growing visual arts center. It's more than just a crawl, it's an experience."
If you happen to be in the Columbia area, join us next week for some serious fun!

the lion weeps tonight

Some bird had quite an aim.

Do Something Beautiful

This Sentence

(does not seem to contain a main clause)

As though it interrupted the rain, this arabesque
kick of silver. Spun sand-veil, in the storm.
Its broken bodies
disjointed.
Light. As though the small across the dimstopped
the road. Or as if shyness surrendered its torture, in order
to laugh. As though a war heard its name, and listened
to prayer. As
though last light would wait for my own entrance,
skirt hem dirty but so utterly available.

If light, used, as an old idea, fractured shard plunged in
as a murder undeserved and terrible. And told as often as
the death of Christ, this is how it is, this is how it was.

If light crashed and Iwalked in it, insistent,
if I entered and if it hurt.
And if the dark were no heroine with a tragic flaw,
not strange.
As though a simple stop. Mere veil, to save it. Light,
I mean, broken, as a spine. Light, at the borders of
our sentence, living on the train of the gown
as we do, available for lifting.
Here is what it has led to.

I don't know where I first stumbled upon a poem by Margo Berdeshevsky but once I did I was smitten. I googled her name and found no books but discovered she was a Chelsea award winner so I ordered that volume which featured 5 more of her poems. They were so stunning I located an email address and wrote to let her know what her poems had meant to me and to ask where I could find more. This was several years ago. We've been in touch ever since and I have eagerly awaited the arrival of her first book of poems "But a Passage in Wilderness" which finally came out from Sheep Meadow Press and arrived last week. The cover features one of her photo montages as she is not only a poet but a photographer (as well as an accomplished actress.)

Her broken sentences and syntax encase beauty, grief and rage at the spoiled world, the violence and brutality woven into lavish and wondrous creation. She bemoans our impotence, physically and spiritually, in thwarting the bewildering havoc and destruction imposed on innocents by man as well as nature. And yet in her furious complaint is a pleading, for light, hope, praise, reconciliation, love and the implication we can achieve such. From "Who Were Those Pretty:"

Five billion nights of fixing. The repaired sky hangs loose
as old men's flesh. How being a human invokes ritual, grief

for spiritual breakage, do I mean breakthrough? Nothing will help you
brace for the broken mind, the fall of the fair jester, the too sad man
in a Paris chair, wailing. Nothing will help you sew solace into the skin.

Our hope is torn from the scrape of God's womb.
Bless the broken, scars, all over this sky.

Berdeshevsky's frustration lies in the interstices between what is and what should be. Although the world simmers with beauty and offers solace, it whispers loudly of another world, a kinder rendition of the one we know. Reading these poems is like wading through the wreckage of a storm after its receded, seeing what you loved floating in ruin, each remnant a reminder of a of past love, a meal, a child, a face, a place, and as you fill your arms with as many salvaged pieces as you can carry away to start anew, you feel the sun's warmth on your face and look up, once again, into that now familiar and washed blue sky and in spite of yourself can't keep your heart handing over the keys.

Lastly, from one of my favorites:

But a Passage in Wilderness

i

But a woman prepares to cross the perfumed
river, little crying.

She has left candles placed like birds with folded wings.
When they are lit, she will watch their heartbeats burn.

Sings,
night-sphinx of rivers, am I eye to eye with your light,
or closer to your claw, tell me this.

Sings the thousand prayers like ponies vying with winners, how
they know the course, but cannot stretch their white-downed spines
to gallop, can't span the fathoms with kicked light.

Broken-eyed roses, colts, don't fall!
Dark matter of the daily heart, do something beautiful. Do this.

Chris Teeter's new site is up!

Chris Teeter has recently become known around these parts for his fabulous doors at Orr St. but he's done a whole lot more than that. Check out the art on his site (which Wayne recently designed AND programmed).
PS: I've decided I'm going to retire and make Wayne my designer. Lunch anyone?

It was merry, it was very

Our Christmas holidays officially started on December 21, our anniversary, which we celebrated in style as tourists in our own downtown Rocheport. After a romantic dinner at Abigails, my hubby surprised me with a rose decked night in the Onyx Room (the two-way fireplace warmed the bedroom AND the bath, need I say more?) at the Amber House. It was a charmed kick-off to the holidays which included hosting my parents as well as a Christmas Eve visit with my cousin and his wife (recently moved to St. Louis from Maryland) and my uncle (who was up to visit them from Florida). I've never lived closer than a 5 hour drive to any family member since I left high school so having family two hours down the road is a real treat.





Another treat is having someone present you with art they created just for you. Wayne made this gorgeous boxed piece for me for Christmas (though the shot, due to the reflections, does not do it justice.) His work is completely stunning and what he comes up with never ceases to amaze me.
Here, too, is the debut of another artist's work: Karen Miedrich Luo! Whodda thunkit?! I gasped when I unwrapped this gift, amazed at how far Karen's recent dabbling with paper collage has progressed. This piece is built around on hearing Pergolesi, a Friday concerto , a favorite poem of mine written by Margo Berdeshevsky. The text of the poem appears on the back of the panels, handwritten in layered text. Guess a little dabblin'll do ya. Well done, amiga!

The Weight of Addition

Yesterday I received my contributor's copy of The Weight of Addition, an anthology of Texas Poetry, edited by Randall Watson and published by Mutabilis Press. The anthology includes the work of 118 poets with Texas connections including Adam Zagajewski, Susan Wood, Ed Hirsch, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tony Hoagland, Sandra Cisneros, Robert Phillips and Cynthia Macdonald. Two of my poems are included.

This from the website:
Randy writes in his introduction, "It is my intention, then that the title, The Weight of Addition, should suggest the depth and range of the work that appears here." He goes on to conclude, " . . . --we have the poems themselves: each a sign and a revelation of our uncommon lives . . . each an artifact of the spirit, of the inner life with its mass and fluidity, . . . each an addition and a weight--humane and troubled and hopeful and necessary--a mirror in which we might discover not just those things that distinguish us, but those that identify us, that connect us, individually, in what might be called our mutuality, our belonging."

The cover photo was taken by Frank White, who shot the fabulous photos ars graphica used in the cities stores campaigns we produced for a few years before cities was no more.

I'm looking forward to making my way through the volume, recalling again what I took with me and what I left behind.