Thursday, March 26, 2009

Pictures

Michael  2 comments

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Poems, goodies, and other ruminations

The God Who Loves You

by Carl Dennis

It must be troubling for the god who loves you

To ponder how much happier you’d be today

Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.

It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings

Driving home from the office, content with your week—

Three fine houses sold to deserving families—

Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened

Had you gone to your second choice for college,

Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted

Whose ardent opinions on painting and music

Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.

A life thirty points above the life you’re living

On any scale of satisfaction. And every point

A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.

You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you

Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments

So she can save her empathy for the children.

And would you want this god to compare your wife

With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?

It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation

You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight

Than the conversation you’re used to.

And think how this loving god would feel

Knowing that the man next in line for your wife

Would have pleased her more than you ever will

Even on your best days, when you really try.

Can you sleep at night believing a god like that

Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives

You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is

And what could have been will remain alive for him

Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill

Running out in the snow for the morning paper,

Losing eleven years that the god who loves you

Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene

Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him

No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend

No closer than the actual friend you made at college,

The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight

And write him about the life you can talk about

With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,

Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

The Writer by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,

My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing

From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys

Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:

I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,

As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,

And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor

Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling

Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;

How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;

And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,

We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature

Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove

To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,

For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits

Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back, 

Beating a smooth course for the right window

And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish

What I wished you before, but harder.

From New and Collected Poems, published by Harcourt Brace, 1988. Copyright © 1969 by Richard Wilbur. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Adrienne Rich

Andrew Hudgins

ASHES

My left hand joggled Johnny’s arm, and Johnny

—Jesus!—

Johnny dropped the coffee can

holding his sister. The can

rolled jerkily,

the lid

spun off, and Sister Rachel spilled

across the black linoleum.

Did I mention we’d been drinking? Everyone

stepped back,

then back again.

Who wants

to track a woman’s ashes on the floor

of a rented hall, then get home

slightly drunk,

pull off his dress shoes and find a residue

of fine dust

trapped in the polished leather creases,

especially if it’s dust

you know by name

and flirted with

ungracefully a time or two:

“Nice shoes. I love those

strap sandals.” Rachel Fuller.

A few

drunk mourners gasped, a few

more giggled,

and since I was the one who knocked her loose

I rooted in the kitchen,

found a broom,

but Johnny

wrestled the splayed broom from my hands

and slapped the heavy ash and particles

of crushed bone toward the can.

“Come on now, Rachel,”

he said. “you wild woman you,” and weeping,

Johnny stabbed and swatted at the floor

until I found a paper towel,

wet it,

and mopped

the last fine dust.

But what next?

At home I left it on the dresser. A month.

Three months.

“Throw that revolting thing away!”

my wife said.

Six months.

“Why are you keeping it?”

Rachel Fuller. Old possibility.

A little loud.

Sharp. Quick.

A little sexy.

But what do I know? I met her at a party,

admired her taut,

tan calves,

but praised her shoes,

and thought

she might have been a little sorry

I couldn’t find the sly

next words to say.

Eight months her ashes challenged me to grieve.

But I kept waiting

and, as I knew it would,

the magic

leached away, the awe

withdrew,

and I disposed of it, her dust, as we do

almost all

the dead—even those

we loved,

loved utterly—

because they are sheer dust

and should be honored as the dust they are.

—Babylon in a Jar: New Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1998)

William Stafford

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life -

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

“Archaeology” by Katha Pollitt

“Our real poems are already in us

and all we can do is dig.”

-Jonathan Galassi

You knew the odds on failure from the start,

that morning you first saw, or thought you saw,

beneath the heatstruck plains of a second-rate country

the outline of buried cities. A thousand to one

you’d turn up nothing more than the rubbish heap

of a poor Near Eastern backwater:

a few chipped beads,

splinters of glass and pottery, broken tablets

whose secret lore, laboriously deciphered,

would prove to be only a collection of ancient grocery lists.

Still, the train moved away from the station without you.

How many lives ago

was that? How many choices?

Now that you’ve got your bushelful of shards

do you say, give me back my years

or wrap yourself in the distant

glitter of desert stars,

telling yourself it was foolish after all

to have dreamed of uncovering

some fluent vessel, the bronze head of a god?

Pack up your fragments. Let the simoom

flatten the digging site. Now come

the passionate midnights in the museum basement

when out of that random rubble you’ll invent

the dusty market smelling of sheep and spices,

streets, palmy gardens, courtyards set with wells

to which, in the blue of evening, one by one

come strong veiled women, bearing their perfect jars.

Exercise: How would you describe your own process of writing a poem? Is it like gardening? Building a bridge? Driving a car? Baking a cake? Find a metaphor that best describes your creative process. Make a list of appropriate vocabulary to go with that metaphor. Use a dictionary, thesaurus, or other tool to help lengthen the list. Write the poem, using the most interesting words. Use as many images as possible. Look to deepen the poem with the use of apt metaphor and simile.

Deborah Digges

THE NEW WORLD

There is news from my friend—

she is willing her own remission.

She’s driving West to begin to live again,

while the incisions made to remove her scars

are still healing, her dressings

to be changed in emergency rooms along the way.

Tonight in this terminal all flights are delayed.

So many children are waiting

who must be flying, this August, from mother

to father. Just an hour ago,

my own son and I idled at the exit

by the interstate restaurant as the Midwest sun

went down until his father came.

Then we moved his small happinesses—

a few toys, new clothes in a travel bag—

from one car to the other.

It seems courage is lack of alternatives.

It seems a long life can be as tragic as watching

their tail-lights join slowly the eastbound traffic,

while in one great sweep the whole country

went dark and the lights came on and home

became sleep, maybe, or reruns on TV,

or the place in the mind where a song continues,

snatched from a passing car. Maybe it’s true

that the back of this airline ticket charts the new world.

On its map we’re stitched together more efficiently

than ever now that we’ve learned to fly,

to maneuver this endless parabola eclipsing the sky

and the ragged Missouri and the long yawn of Interstate 70.

We should let go of each other more easily,

Say goodbye without fear, the heart’s birthmark.

The air is alive with our failure.

Now these children here are somehow mine,

and I offer them, to help the time pass before boarding,

the Match Box cars I carry in my purse,

and which they push, with great understanding,

over the grass-green carpet and the carry-on luggage.

I think of my friend tonight, where she stops

near Denver or Laramie, looking up to bless the stars

as she would bless the superfluous, indestructible

objects by which the future will judge us—

plastic Jesuses and aluminum candlesnuffers

and laminated newspaper cutouts announcing the births

and the deaths and the marriages to which we have been unfaithful,

and to which we have been faithful, also,

like gravity, like a handful of truths

that, once they take hold, never let go again,

and return with us to the earth, as if the earth were elsewhere.

—DEBORAH DIGGES

Eric Grunwald  0 comments

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Postcard from Positano, Part 3

Hannah  3 comments

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Positano Postcard, Part 2

So I've already broken my promise and missed a day of reporting on the conference, but the weather was too nice yesterday to go inside, or even turn on a computer.

Tuesday night we hosted Dana Spiotta and Brad Kessler, this year's Rome Prize Fellows. Dana read from her novel Eat the Document, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Brad read from a forthcoming memoir, Goat Song, about raising goats in Vermont. We were lucky enough to have Brad's wife, the photographer Dona Ann McAdams, join us as well.

This was the first reading of the conference. Everyone was impressed with Dana's descriptions of music and her perfect rendition of a fifteen year-old boy, as well as Brad's cheese-making and detailed scene of tracking a coyote through the snowy woods. Afterwards we had another fabulous meal at the hotel, hosted by Antonio, Carla and Antonio's father, Franco, who is still as charming as ever, and spoke about the best places to see art in Naples, Munich, and Rome.

Last night Jim Shepard and Michael Maren gave an informal talk on screenwriting, then we all gathered in the lobby of the hotel and made the walk over to Antonio and Carla's house. We were greeted by a roaring fire, lovely music, a terrace covered with flickering candles, and piles of delicious food (including the famous meatballs from last year). Then we had our annual open mic night. There were 21 readers--each reading for 2-3 minutes. The writing was both funny and moving, and included two plays (one by Tessa Blake and the other by Jacob Maren), a musical interlude by Sylvia Mann, and, after some convincing, our magnanimous host Antonio Sersale, who read a wonderful piece about drinking coffee in Milan. It was great to hear everyone's work, and there was much warmth and good cheer, which followed us back to the hotel bar. When I left, around 1 am, Syliva's guitar was being passed around and there were songs and happy voices carrying up the stairs as I made my way to my room.

I opened my curtains this morning, expecting to see rain or snow, as the weather predicted, but instead the sky is still sunny, the water glistening. It's time to head down for the one-on-one conferences in the bar--a place I seem to be spending most of my time this week. Tonight Jennie Reeves's daughter Lucy (a professional photographer and DJ) has promised to turn it into a disco. We'll be missing our best dancer from last year, Randy Kirkpatrick, but I promise to try and keep the flame alive.

Hannah  1 comments

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Postcard from Positano

Hannah  2 comments

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