Hidden From Me in Veils of Cloud

I was in Seattle for much of this past week at Winter Institute, a conference for booksellers. It's always such a buzz to be with 500 other slightly insane bookstore types and writers, discussing business, authors, reading, and the like. Not to mention hauling away a metric ton of free books. The sad part was that I didn't actually get to experience much of Seattle. The conference business starts in the early morning and goes on through the day, with publisher sponsored dinners at fancy venues in the evening. On the last day I took a walk with my coworker Sarah and we went to the Pike Place fish market.  And on the first night there was an opening party at Elliot Bay Book Company, where I could not resist buying the new Mary Ruefle collection and Frank Stanford's book-length poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. They were right there on the staff recommends shelf, looking at me.

After a breakfast with New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, among others, It was off to the airport, where we discovered a nerve-wracking wait to see if our 11 am flight would actually ever leave.  Two things make the wait worth it. I was daydreaming, looking out at the trees-- it was a sunny warm day-- and I realized suddenly that the huge bird that had just landed on a telephone pole about 200 feet from me was a bald eagle.   All winter long I've been wanting to see a snowy owl, but this was just as good; it was the first bald eagle I've ever seen that close with my own eyes. The eagle was only there for two minutes before two crows swooped down and drove it away.

About the same time I saw the eagle, I noticed Mt. Rainier in the distance. Since there was not much chance of crows casing the mountain away, I got to see it over a period of several hours, mist-shrouded, clear but distant, and suddenly sharply clear, as if it had moved closer when I wasn't looking. I suddenly remembered the poet Denise Levertov wrote several poems about the Mountain when she moved to Seattle at the end of her life.

Witness

Sometimes the mountain

Is hidden from me in veils

Of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain 

In veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

When I forget or refuse to go

Down to the shore or a few yards

Up the road, on a clear day,

To reconfirm

That witnessing presence.

-- Denise Levertov, in  Evening Train

One of the Ancient Spirits of the World.

Just before Christmas I went to the lakefront, hoping to see one of the snowy owls who have landed here in Chicago for a while. I drove past a group of people who were all staring up into the black branches of an apple tree, some of them pointing, some of them aiming cameras. By the time I parked the car and reached that slushy point on the lawn, the group was disbanding. One woman walked away yelling" who- wee, who- wee" over and over, like she was calling a pig in at slop time.  I hoped a snowy owl would not respond to that sort of thing. I went walking on a sliding cold trail, through the slush, out into the prairie field at Montrose Point.  I saw a squirrel, and a man with binoculars looking at finches, and breathed in the scent of dry grass and winter. But I didn't see a snowy owl.

I thought of the first poetry workshop I ever attended, led by Diane Wakoski. For the first session, she just read us recent poems she'd written, and one of them was the poem "Removed from Natural Habitiat," about the speaker viewing snowy owls in a zoo:

...Part of their beauty is
In their stillness, the unblinking eyes like money that is hoarded,
The head cocked a little, the body stationary, and seemingly
Unjointed."

I wanted to see a snowy owl at the lakefront, in the snow fields on the beach, or in a low tree, or out on the cold pier.  I wanted to see one snowy owl, even though I'd seen videos and photos of many of these recent city visitors online.  you can't google " snowy owl chicago" without plenty of information. And images appearing. I found for example, that these owls descending from the north are called an irruption, not a migration, and that more than likely it comes of there being an overabundance of owls in the north, so that the younger ones are driven away by the elders, and come to us looking for food.

I thought I might see one of the ancient spirits of the world.

I wanted to see a snowy owl, with my own eyes, but did not, and so had to cast around for other forms of ferocity, and beauty.

Pretending to be Morpheus: An Short Interview with Dave Awl

I've known writer/performer Dave Awl since the late 1990s, when I used to see him as part of the famed Neo-Futurist ensemble and their long-running Two Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind evening of 30 plays in 60 minutes. I have always appreciated his work, both the plays, monologues, songs, and skits from TMLMTBGB, and printed work from journals and his collection of poetry and prose, What the Sea Means, and was reminded of that fact when I saw he'd been featured recently in the on-line journal Escape Into Life. Dave was kind enough to respond to some questions that occurred to me after reading this lovely batch of work.  (I originally typed "lovely bath" of work, which also seems apt--one bathes in his work and emerges warm, refreshed, and clean, ready for the day or the night to startle and begin.)

Lives of the Spiders: Can you talk a bit about your process with the Night Diary poems? Do you compose drafts late at night while you are already (still) up, or do these writings stem from those middle of the night "oh crap I woke up and can't get back to sleep" times?

Dave Awl:  I do often find myself writing poems at two or three a.m -- it's a natural writing time for me, when my inhibitions and my guard are down and things flow a little more freely. But it's not a requirement, and I write by day sometimes, too ... I'm pretty sure I scribbled some of my first Night Diaries poems down in my spiral notebook while riding the bus in broad daylight.

The main idea behind the Night Diaries poems was that I wanted to try writing poems that followed the strange logic and surreal thought processes of dreams -- kind of like dreaming out loud into my notebook or keyboard while fully awake. I had been studying Jung for years, taking classes at the Jung Institute in Evanston, and keeping a dream journal for a while before I wrote the first Night Diaries poems. But rather than turning my dreams themselves into poems, I wanted to try to consciously write like the part of my brain that makes up my dreams. Pretending to be Morpheus, for a few minutes at a time.

LOTS: Do you consider yourself to be a "night person?" What associations or tendencies do you have with writing at night that might not be true of writing in the brazen light of day?

DA: Yes, I'm very much a nocturnal person. I've always found nighttime peaceful and relaxing, and it's when a lot of the most fun things happen. Night is when all the fabulous monsters come out. I like that nighttime is less crowded ... my literary hero and eventual friend Russell Hoban used to say that as an artist you need empty spaces in which to create, and I think at night there are more empty spaces to write into. It's easier to be imaginative at night, too. To steal a line from a performance piece I once did on this subject, non sequiturs and useful twists of expression breed in the moonlight.

And I think of this lovely line from Russell Hoban's novel The Medusa Frequency: "At three o’clock in the morning the moments patter like rain on the roof of night; the silence is a road to anywhere."

LOTS:  The titles of these works in Escape Into Life indicate more material--of there's a "Night Diary 82" one would assume there's a "Night Diary 1" and a "Night Diary 81."  Other poems found on-line, such as "Film Loop #12" for example, would lead one to consider the existence of other Film Loop poems. Do you have an archive of Night Diary entries?  And if so, can you quote from another of those entries for the readers of Lives of the Spiders?  (Dave's answer, after the break.)

Introduction to the Best Words from the Short Biographies of Poets in "The Best American Poetry 2013"

These best words, taken from the biographies of poets in this year's Best American Poetry volume, were selected by a panel of linguists and crossword puzzle dignitaries from across the nation, and in two cases, (Senegal and Norway) overseas. Meetings, taking place over a contentious three days in Iowa City, only nearly avoided violence--the verb advocates were adamant in their ongoing quest for better representation, while the noun contingent, as usual, argued for the primacy of persons, places, and things. Thankfully, the question of whether or not any one biographical note may contribute more than one word to our annual list seems to at last be laid to rest. A rare majority opinion of the delegates decided once and for all that one word and one word only may be selected from any contributor's biography, no matter how worthy and attention-getting accompanying words in the note might be.

Any such list, is, at its heart, a tad arbitrary. Nonetheless, the panelists feel we've been able to latch on to an acre of the  national poetic landscape, reflecting the varied and various responses of poets who have been asked to describe their own works. Interestingly enough, this is the first year that two words beginning with the prefix "un" have made the list, and they happen to appear side by side. This is also the fourth year in the past five that the word grandmother has been so honored.

The editors wish to thank the National Endowment for Noun Appreciation, the Smitherton and Aptly Adverb Coalition, and the Society of Thesauri Development for their on-going and much-needed support. Special thanks and recognition are due to Thaddeus (last name Jones?) the bartender at the Deadwood Tavern, for his fortitude and patience as we work out some form of payment plan that does not involve the authorities. The check is not yet in the mail, but we expect to hear back from the fine folks at the Guggenheim Foundation any day now, at which time a final settling of accounts can be made.

Without further ado, the list:

magpies.  soldier.  echo.  enlightenment.  collections.  nagging.  violence.  faceless.  risk.  

accumulation.  enemies.  leaven.  numbered.  grace.  compost.  confusion.  skipped.  prissy.  born.

loneliness.  dopplegangers.  tonic.  pagan.  numerous.  hiding.  residencies.  puberty.  dire.

flight.  laugh.  sisters.  elopement.  secret.  voyage.  bedrooms.  luck.  impossible.  glamour.

ladder.  hurt.  proximity.  horse.  code.  craving.  crime.  decipher.  birdbath.  baffles.  rapidly.

sheep.  doorframe.  sacrament.  speaker.  therefore.  absence.  suitor.  meander.  castaway.

taverns.  openness.  choose.  grandmother.  road.  everywhere.  seduction.  bedtime.  suffering.  

mortal.  concrete.  unfolding.  uncomfortable.  betrothal.   grateful.

The things one comes across in the dark wooded internet

Lynn Emmanuel's work, for example.  I have liked her prose poetry work, it has such an affinity and response to Gertrude Stein. Here she's in a more lyric mode, and she does it oh so well.

I also found our recently that my mentor and friend Diane Wakoski has a new book just out from Anhinga Press. I've ordered my copy, and hope it is en route.

Meanwhile, in Germany, poet Sarah Sloat discovers that she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For the second poem, if you follow the link.

Contemporary surrealist Eric Baus has a new book coming soon.  I think these might be in it.


Dorothea Lasky curates a poetry reading series in Brooklyn.  I'm not excited enough by this news to simply take off to Brooklyn, but you'd better believe the next time that work or friendship brings me to NYC I'll be eager to see if the trip coincides with a night when this takes place.


In a final and mostly self-serving entry, I'll say that I have some prose poems in New World Writing.  Did I say that already here?  That's OK, repetition is a form of music.  And I just re-read these and I'm still fond of them.

The Woman Who Some­times Sits Invis­i­bly at the Foot of Your Bed

I've been so crazed and busy with work, and worried about parental health and such that I forgot to crow about this--but I have prose poems in the newest issue of New World Writing.  I submitted five prose bits, and editor Frederick Barthelme accepted all five, and lo, there was much rejoicing, much popping of corks and hooray the lad's still got it kind of exclamations among the voices in my head.  Expect more regular updates for a while, as it appears I'll be back to a normal 40 hour week throughout this holiday season, leaving me no excuses for not at least saying hello to the keyboard now and then, just to be friendly.

When the dish ran away with the spoon, while the knife and fork went about their daily routine and tried not to speak of such matters.

This just in over the transom

I have a poem up in the latest issue of Transom, and I feel very lucky to have work there among such good company.