Dear Family Chronicle of a Flock of Pigeons,

There are so few pigeon

heroes, or dastards,

and also, I think,

so few affairs, since

each and every character

mates

for life—the history

of pigeons

is a chronicle

without wars—sure, a falcon

grabs a sacrifice now

and again,

but on the whole this

is the tale of how you rose,

a chorus on

a January morning,

wings nearly

white against a bank

of darker cloud, and I

read that chapter,

thankful to see

the fog of my breath

while I waited

on the train, nearly

able in that moment

to love my lifetime the way

a flock of pigeons loves

to be silver in a flash

of sky, dark

then silver.

After the poetry reading

It was an hour before dusk, very hot, and the light of early evening was made especially beautiful but the intensity of the readers he'd heard just minutes before. Ravenswood Avenue, that bland alley of light manufacturing, took on the mantle of temporary beauty.

Dear Dented Box of Cupcakes,

 

Dear Dented Box of Cupcakes,

All the toddlers weep at your disarray, preschoolers  
point out 

the ruin of your frostings, powdered sugar

pools 

like blue sand in your corners, and your devil’s food 
bundles, your Mini-Cooper carloads of lard 
are smeared, smashed,

among the fallen. 

Let this be the worst thing to happen today, 
a slip and an oops, 

some momentary grieving. Let this be 

the worst thing 

some of these witnesses will ever know. But of course 
that’s impossible. There shall be loss 
upon truckload of loss. Someone will die.

Someone will fall 

in love with somebody else. Might as well, 
I tell the children, (as I push them

aside) might as well try

for a smidge of icing.

The Spider Poetry/Prose Challenge

Why should this blog be all about me?  Why can't it be about you, and spiders, too? Please submit up to three poems or short (500 words or less) blocks of prose containing the spider as image, myth, or word by July 3. During the August I'll share the best submissions. The works submitted do not have to be "about" spiders, or in any particular form or format, but should contain at least one word or phrase that connotes arachnids: web, spider, weave, etc. This is your chance to be viewed by the veritable dozens of "Lives of the Spiders" readers. If the call for work takes on extra zing and fizz, we can think about an anthology, of the e-book or print format.  But let's just start with spiders, and writing. Ready, set, write.  (Or send, if you have that one spiderwork poised and ready in a file or drawer)  robmc1002@gmail.com

 From Spiders (c. 1941):



     Spiders keep on growing and molting until they are full-grown. One of the pictures on page 22 shows a trap-door spider that has just molted. In time the female spiders find mates and lay eggs. The story then begins all over again.
     

Tuesday Funk, with Rhinos, and Spiders Oh My

I read at the Tuesday Funk reading series in May.  And this was captured via modern technology and now its on the internets and such.

You May Run Into Gertrude Stein on the Bustled Streets of New York City

I was in NYC for BookExpo, the big annual bookselling conference.  Walking to a dinner that was going to be paid for by the publishers, and understand that if you are a bookseller at BEA pretty much all your food and drink will be paid by publishers, I ran across this lovely sculpture of Miss Gertrude Stein, looking both solid and also cloud-like, in a Buddha kind of way. It was such a pleasure to see her. Among all the flash, and promotions, and publicity machines grinding their tired gears, it's good to be reminded that part of of the industry is rooted in a love of words, and how they an be coaxed to play and be new.  The dinner, by the way, was lovely, and I like writer Lauren Myracle even more than I did before.

A SOUND

Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this.



DINING

Dining is west.


CELERY

Celery tastes taste where in curled lashes and little bits and mostly in remains.



(Three of my favorite sections of Tender Buttons, first published in 1914.)

Spring Reading: A Partial List

1. In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys, poetry by Campbell McGrath.

I bought this after seeing him read at the Harold Washington Library a Couple of weeks back. I love his long Whitmanesque lines, and many of his prose poems.  I am not enamored, and I am never enamored, of his poems or anyone's poems about poems and the writing of poems.  I want every poet everywhere to be limited to one poem about the writing of poetry in her lifetime. Write more than that, obviously, but then alter, obscure, and otherwise hid the origin of the poem.  Too much preaching to a choir of one, the self.  Too much  self-inflation.  I believe we must believe we are doing some of the most important business anywhere when writing a poem, and I believe we ought to never say that aloud. So when I run into stanza like:

But the poem one is about to start,
the poem one is going to write
immediately, very soon, perhaps next March,
is like a foghorn calling mournfully in the night.

It makes me cranky.  I feel like the poet has just gone ahead and admitted that no one cares about poetry but other people writing poetry.  That may well be true, but do we have to have that fact pushed in our faces like a grapefruit? It does seem to me that this "poems about writing poetry" phase happens as some poets, often poets of certain renown, begin to age.  Call it the Billy Collins syndrome. I like some of Mr. Collins' work just fine, but he has a lot of these "watch me write a poem" poems.

Thankfully, Mr. McGrath, has plenty in this collection to admire and enjoy. One of the standouts is "Sugar or Blood." He read it masterfully at the reading.  And indeed, on one level it is about a poet's task and responsibility in the world:

I realize that I have never said plainly most of what I truly believe,
I have shied from difficulty and misstated my deepest fears,
I have not borne full witness to the suffering in the streets of the cities
     I love,
I have not waled a picket line against the tyranny of greed,
I have been wily and evasive even on behalf of art, 
I have not praised the movies in tones equal to the rapture
I have known there...

But if gives place and purchase to a reader who is not firmly placed in the realm of poetry.
McGrath could have said:

My poems never say plainly most of what I truly believe,
My poems shy from difficulty and misstate my deepest fears...  and so on.  I'm glad he didn't.

2. Metaphysical Dog: Poems, by Frank Bidart

An aging master, still at the top of his form.  I'm not sure who else in American poetry can construct a poem on the page with such grace, care and beauty in the making, and linebreaks that are at once both inevitable and surprising. In these poems he is not using the persona poems he made his name with--the persona here is a "Frank Bidart" who is lonely, broken-hearted, lion-hearted, determined to continue to wrestle with hard truths and the unsayable, which nevertheless he continues to say. "Poem Ending With a Sentence by Heath Ledger" is one of the best things I've ever read.  

3. City of Your Final Destination, a novel by Peter Cameron.

It's such a pleasure, sometimes, to read a novel you have read several times before. Like spending time with a well-known friend. I love this book, about a grad student who travels to Uruguay in an attempt to convince the executors of an obscure writer's estate to grant him permission to write the authorized biography. The grad student, Omar, is from Tehran originally, his family moved to Toronto, and now he lives in Kansas. The executors are the dead writer's wife, his mistress, who lived with the wife after her pregnancy, and the dead writer's gay brother. Omar's arrival is a stone thrown into a pond, and the depiction of the ripples is touching, tender, and funny. Cameron spares his characters not at all, but he loves them enough to make us love them too. His prose has the strength of early Hemingway: to use plank-plain sentences and construct something not showy, but utilitarian and beautiful.