READING AND CONFERENCE SCHEDULE 2009-2010

SELF PITY AND THE MALE HERO FANTASY

At midnight I am imagining the circumstances
of my own beautiful death. A horrific car crash
off a moonlit bridge into the Willamette river,
the headlights flaring out like a star's collapse,
and I pushing the passenger out of the car's
half open window at the last minute,
mouthing through bubbles something heroic
like, save yourself, or go on with your life–make a donation
in my memory to a village of crippled children.
The person who is inevitably saved is a woman--
my wife, and later, after they have recovered
my body, she holds me limp in her arms
as my friends and family gather–none of them
able to muster even a single word.
She moans like a chimpanzee whose young
has been dragged by the throat into the forest
by a Bengal tiger, the firemen swarming around us
covering her with blankets, a cop with a degree
in psychology kneading her shoulder, saying,
Your husband went out like a firecracker,
a real honest to god goddam hero.
Meanwhile all she can notice are the icicles
melting under my ears. A fantasy imagined
not because we want to die
but because we want everyone to see our courage,
our claim at a worthwhile life, blue light drifting
over our lover's shoulders and hands.
But the fantasy always ends. After the wake
the relatives pack up their pickup trucks
and leave. The geraniums die in the hallway,
the dog no longer scratching at the door for us,
and pity is taken away with the trash.
What people remember is not how
we took a knife in our gut for a friend in a bar fight,
or broke through glass and concrete to pull
a twelve year old girl out of a burning building,
but how we left our lovers after drinking
three tall glasses of Jim Beam and Jamesons
and smashed in another person's windshield
with a baseball bat, lied to the police
and went to jail, cheated on our wives
and smacked around our children.
And how much easier it is if we are the ones to die
and not our wives or lovers. That way
we don't have to get sober
and walk through the five stages of grief,
and see our lovers after they are dead
riding the city buses and on the covers of magazines,
and in the windows of coffee shops and in crowds,
their hair tangled in their green silk scarves,
and know that someone is punishing us.
If I have a choice it will be me
who lies down first on that metal board
to be incinerated, and my wife will sprinkle
every inch of my body into the faces of my family
off the Oregon Coast. So I won't have to tell her
in those last few moments–the cigarillo
falling from her lips after the gunman's hand
wrinkles the trigger and she takes the bullet
collapsing into my lap like a used up restaurant napkin–
how much I love the French and Italian
she refuses to speak to me, or her hatred
of Cilantro and seafood and love of musicals
and Barbara Streisand. So I won't have to listen
to her coughing through spit and blood
saying, You want people to feel sorry for you,
look what your self pitying hero fantasy has done to me.

Jay Nebel

Tell your life story in 6 words and add to this list:

Robyn: "She lives. She survived. She lived!"
Rich: He plays records and it helps.
John: Tomorrow seemed like yesterday. It wasn't.
kevin: "was born, currently living, will die."
jenjer: "Seldom right, never wrong, usually confused."
Kevin: I was born. I'm taller now.
catalano: I never expected them to care.
Blackie: Too young to be so old....
Steph ~ "I"m pretty much clueless right now"
SeattleGhostWriter ~~ A lonely drifter walking in shadows
Shaindel: Beat up but still runs good.

Soul Make A Path Through Shouting

for Elizabeth Eckford
Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957


Thick at the schoolgate are the ones
Rage has twisted
Into minotaurs, harpies
Relentlessly swift;
So you must walk past the pincers,
The swaying horns,
Sister, sister,
Straight through the gusts
Of fear and fury,
Straight through:
Where are you going?

I'm just going to school.

Here we go to meet
The hydra-headed day,
Here we go to meet
The maelstrom-

Can my voice be an angel-on-the-spot,
An amen corner?
Can my voice take you there,
Gallant girl with a notebook,
Up, up from the shadows of gallows trees
To the other shore:
A globe bathed in light,
A chalkboard blooming with equations-

I have never seen the likes of you,
Pioneer in dark glasses:
You won't show the mob your eyes,
But I know your gaze,
Steady-on-the-North-Star, burning-

With their jerry-rigged faith,
Their spear on the American flag,
How could they dare to believe
You're someone sacred?:
Nigger, burr-headed girl,
Where are you going?

I'm just going to school.



Soul Make A Path Through Shouting from Soul Make A Path Through Shouting
by Cyrus Cassells, published by Copper Canyon Press. 1994

MUONS ARE PASSING THROUGH YOU

This is what is:: You are walking down an empty road
in the middle of the night. The poor moon drips
weak light on you like waxy tallow, and it makes you cold.
Your lover has informed you that your services are
no longer needed and your heart feels like a cancer,
your own soul is like a thorn you have been stabbed with.
Dark hedges line the road and there are voices
whispering within them: they are the voices of the
lost, the damned, the many who will be legion.
And they know your name.

And this is true: You are a stardust person.
Muons are passing through you as you read this.
Cosmic rays are building you up and breaking you down.
Seas are evaporating, gases are freezing into planets,
planets are spinning off into the void.
Hold out your hand and watch the pions dance,
watch your nuclei exchanging forces with the universe,
watch the miracles ebb and flow as endless joy
folds into endless silence and everything is
everywhere all at once and it goes on and on.

And here is more: The infinite is already in you.
It is in you and of you, and it may save you.
But if it saves you, it will give you no choice.
So go down the road. Be death, be stardust, enter
the duality known to the generations who are vanished,
who left behind this double image, but only half
the message, just the instructions for how to begin.


Eleanor Lerman from "Our Post-Soviet
History Unfolds," Sarabande Books 2005

King of the River

If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly's blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.
If the knowledge were given you,
but it is not given,
for the membrane is clouded
with self-deceptions
and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.

Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.

If the power were granted you
to break out of your cells,
but the imagination fails
and the doors of the senses close
on the child within,
you would dare to be changed,
as you are changing now,
into the shape you dread
beyond the merely human.
A dry fire eats you.
Fat drips from your bones.
The flutes of your gills discolor.
You have become a ship for parasites.
The great clock of your life
is slowing down,
and the small clocks run wild.
For this you were born.
You have cried to the wind
and heard the wind's reply:
"I did not choose the way,
the way chose me."
You have tasted the fire on your tongue
till it is swollen black
with a prophetic joy:
"Burn with me!
The only music is time,
the only dance is love."

If the heart were pure enough,
but it is not pure,
you would admit
that nothing compels you
any more, nothing
at all abides,
but nostalgia and desire,
the two-way ladder
between heaven and hell.
On the threshold
of the last mystery,
at the brute absolute hour,
you have looked into the eyes
of your creature self,
which are glazed with madness,
and you say
he is not broken but endures,
limber and firm
in the state of his shining,
forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.

Stanley Kunitz

Metaphor by Sparks

A metaphor is a glorious thing
A diamond ring
The first day of summer
A metaphor is a breath of fresh air
A turn-on
An aphrodisiac

Chicks dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig metaphors
Chicks dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig metaphors
Chicks dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig metaphors

Use them wisely,
Use them well,
And you'll never know the hell of loneliness

A metaphor is a popular place
A pocket space
A multiplex showing
A remake whose action is louder than words
She whispers "can we be going, going?"

Chicks dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig metaphors
Chicks dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig metaphors
Chicks dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig metaphors

Use them wisely
Use them well
And you'll never know the hell of loneliness

Whose up for a metaphor?
(We're up for a metaphor)
Are you chicks up for a metaphor?
(Yes, we're up for a metaphor)

Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't mix them
(We, we, we won't mix them)
Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't mix them
(We wouldn't dream of mixing them)

Use them wisely
Use them well
And you'll never know the hell of loneliness

A metaphor is a glorious thing
(Chicks dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig)
A metaphor is a breath of fresh air
(Chicks dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig)

Ars Poetica

Write each of your poems
as if it were your last.
In this century, saturated with strontium,
challenged with terrorism,
flying with supersonic speed,
death comes with terrifying suddenness.
Send each of your words
like a last letter before execution,
a call carved on a prison wall.
You have no right to lie,
no right to play pretty little games.
You simply won't have time
to correct your mistakes.
Write each of your poems,
tersely, mercilessly,
with blood-- as if it were your last.

Blaga Dimitrova

(translated from Bulgarian by Ludmilla G. Popova-Wightman)

Blaga Nikolova Dimitrova was born on 2 January 1922 in Byala Slati. She served briefly as vice president to Bulgaria's first democratically elected president. She published 15 books of poetry and eight novels, as well as several essays and plays. Her works have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Beetle Orgy

By Benjamin Grossberg

Bloom up from the earth, blooming and curling
like ribbon, and at semi-regular intervals
sprouting leaves: almost the border art
of a Celtic manuscript, the vines up along the fence
of this old tennis court. Amid the wreck

of the net, the cracks of the surface, the rust
along the poles still standing, the vines
are a saving delicacy. Not jarring at all,
though incongruous—except as a reminder
that the school yard will gladly take this place

back in a few untended years, that between
the vines and grass, the tennis court
will be ground into meal and digested.
I stop at one of the vine edgings caught
by even finer detail: the leaves themselves

are digested: they have been eaten to
irregular lace, and the perpetrators are still here—
five of them across one particular leaf, lined up
straight and even, like cars in a parking lot.
Beetles: their backs a lustrous green and copper,

taken hot from the kiln, thrown on a bed of sawdust
that burst into flame, then lidded over
so the vacuum could draw the metal oxides
to the surface. At first it looks like there are five,
but now I see that there are seven, no eight—

and that in three of the spaces, beetles
are doubled up, one mounting, back legs
twitching, as if running and getting nowhere;
and one mounted, also moving, slightly rocking
in back, close to the point of intersection—

or penetration—in any case, where the bodies
touch. And here I come to it—amid the advancing
vines and decrepit court: they're on other leaves, too,
all around—coupling in company, hundreds of them,
the rows melding to make a single metallic band.

Back in Houston, a friend had parties—
lawn bags in the living room numbered with tape
to store guest clothing; plastic drop cloths
spread out in the spare bedroom (cleared of furniture
for the occasion), a tray of lubricants, different


brands in tubes or bottles, labels black, red, and silver
--a high tea sensibility. The artifacts remained
uncollected in his apartment for days, even weeks
after, when I would drop by to find his talk
transformed, suddenly transcendental—

the communality, he told me, the freedom: not
just from the condom code (HIV negative I
was never invited) but freed of individuation—
nothing less than rapture, men more than brothers,
a generosity of giving and taking, to both give

and take greedily, that he had experienced
no where else. Could I understand that?
The room pulsing as if inhabited by
a single animal, caught up in a single sensibility.
Could I understand? I could read transformation

in his face, could see his eyes, feel him trying
to tell me something: to offer this reliable revelation—
what he always knew would come, but what always
in coming disarmed him. As he talked I looked around
the spare bedroom, attempting to see it

in terms other than lust—a couple dozen men,
how they would have lined up, become a single
working unit on clear plastic, how their bodies
might have formed a neat chain. I looked around
and tried; couldn't I understand that?

So each beetle a tiny scarab, a dime-size jewel
that glints in the sun. I lean over and touch
their backs with the tip of my finger: running
up and down the bright, smooth surface
like piano keys, hard enough to feel resistance

but not to interject foreign music. Together they form
a band of light, a band of glaze, the gold leafing
that shadows the vines in Celtic manuscripts, a living art.
Maybe that's how it was at my friend's parties—
God leaning over the house on a casual tour

of the wreck of the world, noticing ornamentation
where it wasn't expected. Moved to add
his touch, he reaches a hand through the clouds, runs
his finger over the hard arch of their backs, covering
the length of each spine with the tip;

each man brightens at the touch, comes to know
something expected, unexpected, and tenuous—
and God also, come to some knowledge
as if for the first time, is distracted and pleased
by the collective brightness of human skin…

Then I think of God fitting the roof back on
my friend's house, and exhaling, satisfied—
just like me as I walk away
from the tennis court, just like the men inside.