Submission

If I weren't on an oxytocin high (oh for heaven's sake, it's not that, it's just my love for humankind and puppetkind), I wouldn't consider it, but here I go, thinking it might be a good idea to submit some poems here and there. It leads me on a hunt through the year-old and older, and leads my husband to yell at me for not spending the time on doing novel revisions instead. I know, I ought to, but once in a while I need to feel like I have some skin in the game.

I doubt this one will find a home anywhere literary, but I have a feeling there may be someone out there who will like it. It's part of a series about Lilith.

IV. Desert Companions

“Dance with the pretty witch.”
—Faust

Only one writer got it right: The man was made of earth
But I was made of fire. Under the blazing sun
I tend my lions, wreathing their necks with chains
Of flowers my touch alone can make bloom here.
They groan and purr under this soft restraint.

Ostriches speed by, their fancy feathers bouncing;
They need no adornment. Nor do I; wings and hair
Are enough to inspire a gaping glance if anyone came near.

I seek out a shady cleft of rock
When it’s time to nurse the serpents.

The circles around the eyes of the owls
Glow like stars above me in the night.
We screech to each other in delight.

Image: Oh roar a roar for ouroboros...

When Doing It Wrong Is Right

Writing poetry is such a weirdass thing to do. And reading it to other people even more so. I'm always like WTF? Then I go to something like the Cliff Lynn/Rocky Jones production last night [would give a link but it's pretty much wholly facebooked] and I get it. It's everything ELSE other than creative pursuits (and playing and hanging out and food and love and, OK, healing too) that is a weirdass waste of time. Why do we do anything else?

I think it has something to do with coming to poetry pretty late in the game. I wrote a couple poems in college, but was known as a fiction writer/journalist. Then in 1995, I was home from work for a week taking painkillers and it reminded me of some feelings and I wrote a poem. Then there was a day in July or August, 2006 I think, and I was running on the C&O towpath and a poem came into my mind. It gave me something to think about while running, because I don't wear an iPod. Then that just kept happening. My poems are old-fashioned and I'm probably doing it wrong.

I'm so creepy and dull about poetry, I have no training or academic background, don't know what I'm talking about, as worth listening to as a right-winger saying "I know what I like!" I'm also slavishly, sometimes ickily devoted and promotional to people who run readings and do presses and such, because it can be so fucking hard and I want to just be a Big Fan and say how wonderful they are.

Having said all that, sometimes I'm on target in spite of myself, and I bought a book by Le Hinton last night, and if you don't do it too, you're doing it wrong.

They also let me read a poem in time for me to get back to DC and get the fishnets on in time for the fundraiser. And to dance to some DJs who were also doing it wrong in the best way possible.

Here's the poem, which happened because I was at the beauty shop yesterday and saw a sign that said "your hair can save the earth." They're filling oil booms with hair. And I was reading this at the same time; Oniony but sharp enough to have fooled several major news outlets, and therefore me, until I could get to where I could check it out.

Beauty Shop

Is it a myth that hair and nails
Grow on in the grave? These vain snips,
Dyed buttercup and crimson, may
The multitudinous seas incarnadine.
The engineers are looking for
A way to stop the bleeding. Been there.
Their defenses booms and concrete,
Like fighting fire with counter burns.
The seas, like us, contain multitudes,
We suck up the oil,
The fish suck up the oil,
The soil sucks up the oil,
And so it is that I suck
Up a blot of old Dick Cheney.
When I die, I'd prefer to be burned.

Hobbitstweedle

I'll blow the cobwebs off while the snowmegeddon soup cooks. Been working on a project that demands two hours a night, plus the working for a living, plus home, plus a fun project I'm writing on. I keep having to say no to potentially fun things to do. But even that's not giving me enough time. So after tonight, no poems, no blogging, and horrors, no facebook (except for official Choir business) til April. I couldn't quit cold turkey. I'm just doing what they call in distance running a "taper."

My two library books this week, E. Ethelbert Miller's The 5th Inning and Mick Wall's When Giants Walked the Earth, a biography of Led Zeppelin, have so few things in common, you don't even need a hand to count them on:

1. They both rock.

2. They each can be consumed in small, convenient, bite-size bits.

There the similarities end. Miller's memoir is a carefully structured series of poetic, detailed meditations on age, writing, love, race, and baseball.

Led Zeppelin had a lead singer who started out in a band called Hobbitstweedle.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, and they don't mind if they do.

I can't get through more than two pages at a time of Giants, and it's not only my packed schedule that's to blame. Wall's crazy overwriting, yeah, I know, pot meet kettle, makes every sentence an adventure, let's say that. One minute you're hearing about Jimmy Page stealing every song, arrangement, and riff that's not nailed down, then you're inside Bonham's bass drum (Page wouldn't let him use a double bass because the resulting rhythmic complexity threw him so far off base), and the next minute you're in the Edgewater Inn, figuratively speaking. I actually was there once, on business, writing about people doing a genomics project. It has been restored to become a lovely place, with a huge lobby full of fireplaces and comfy chairs and board games.

Anyway, I took to opening it at random before falling into a coma at night, and here's the kinds of things you open up to on any given page:

"Thirty-four-year-old Johnny Bindon was a nasty piece of work...a London 'face' who counted among his friends the Kray twins and Princess Margaret, and who would serve several prison sentences before being accused in 1979 of murdering another underworld enforcer named John Darke in a club brawl. Both menacingly intimidating and apparently hilariously funny depending on his mood, Bindon's favourite party trick was to balance as many as six half-pint mugs on his erect penis. Bankrupt at the time of being hired by [manager] Grant, the only thing that assuaged his violent temper was the vast amounts of marijuana he smoked. With both Page and Plant now receiving death threats before the tour had even begun, G had decided he needed someone like Bindon along for if and when things got rough. The trouble was, with someone like Bindon, things were likely to get rough sooner rather than later. As Alan Callan would observe, 'He certainly wasn't hired for his dinner conversation.'"

Interesting sentence structure and comma placement aside, how deliciously weird is that? And there are like 450 pages of it, on and on. Of course, as DH says, it would be more remarkable if it were pints. And with all his writing, Wall never answers the really important questions, like how the hell did they come up with Kashmir, and were those half-pints arranged vertically or horizontally?

Maybe I need to read it backwards.

Photo: Miss Pamela Des Barres, formerly of the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company.

Rainy Night House

Strange hearing that driving the New York Avenue gateway into the city, seeing condos I wrote ads for years ago with dark windows and the clubs, too early for lines to form. Tonight was very cozy, with a poetry reading by one of my favorite poet friends who just put out her chapbook, and an open mic. I'm always so amazed at what happens at open mics of any size and the odd combinations and congruencies. Tonight it sounded like everyone had a poem about fish, and everyone had a poem about time. You could say that's typical for poets post-surrealism, almost like a ticket in. When the last open mic reader got out his sax and started doing this one-man bebop coffeehouse thing along with a computer track, I started feeling how close we were to the water, with the wind blowing the drizzle around outside and us in this old-house cafe, a small hurricane party of poets.

When I got home, I decided to pick a card for the next poem and I was hoping it would be Page of Cups, with the picture of the man holding a cup with a small fish leaping from it. But it was Knight of Cups, whom I'd actually been thinking about last week, so I'll get to work on that.

And before that a surreal trip to the mall to get DD some shoes. The mall is so big, we kept getting lost. Every few stores I'd have to check the map. There is still so much stuff there, and all of it sparkling and glittery, but not so many people, and thank goddess no Santa bombing, just perfume bombing. Every few steps, someone wanted to help us or show us something, anything, anything but how to get to where we were going to get kids' shoes. DD was a little rattled by all the people pushing us; it was like a souk out there. I tried to explain that it was hard to sell things now because many people didn't have jobs or money to spare. "Are we in the Depression?" she asked. She is fascinated by Kit, the American Girl Depression-era doll. I am glad I won't have to go to a mall anytime soon again.

Me, I'm thinking about a different decade. Shame there's just a glimpse of Jaco Pastorius, but my ears still work sometimes.

Absolutely Free, Like The Mothers Sing

I'm giving away a copy of Gravity Dancers, a collection of Washington women's writing, to whoever submits (wait for it) the most original knock-knock joke (in my judgment) over the next two or three days. Put it in the comments here or on the facebook version, all's good.

Some people, like like Ira Shapira in this Washington Post story, say when you give it away, you're messing up the whole structure. He said bloggers took his story. Well, first off, they didn't really take his story, they just made fun of it. I don't know if he gets that. That's what the blogs are for. I think he started to understand that in the chat. He isn't allowed make fun of people in the Post, whereas snark is Gawker's business model (and it has had its ups and downs). I've heard it said that Gawker media is quite the sweatshop and doesn't pay for crap, which would put it on a par with most newspapers through the past 30 years.

When I post a poem on this blog, it means I probably won't be able to submit it to get published anywhere, or enter it in a contest. I'm supposed to put all kinds of privacy settings and prohibitions on my blog so Facebook, where it's mirrored, won't be able to take my blog snark and my poems and give them away and reprint them. I'm imagining that scenario, or that of a blogger taking my poems and making fun of them. That's so pathetic, I'd actually feel sorry for the blogger. Besides, a poem I didn't post here or on Facebook or anywhere but which was sent with proper decorum to a contest, and won, got picked up by a newspaper and got made fun of, so what's left for me in terms of humiliation and lack of recompense? Butt, meet rock bottom.

If I give away poems on my blog, am I reducing the overall value of poetry? Mostly I have no idea whether anything I write is any good, so I might as well put it up here as spend the time trying to get it published. I send a lot of random bait into the cosmos, and sometimes good things come back my way. I don't mean to sound insulting, but I'm much too lazy and it's much too dull to worry about who has the rights and who has the copies and where it's all going, so I refuse to do that for my poems, at least. Let them be free!

The Harriet Tubman poem turned into a multi-part mess, but this portion is relevant to this rant...

Master Spy for the Union

Because I cannot bear to see your brilliance
Thus dimmed, I write you,
I have set my mind to the task
Of finding some way you might now be
Repaid for your heroic service.

In the new world, they say there is no need
Any longer to hide ourselves. In the new world,
You are a laundress. For a while, the work
Brought an odd peace, a return to the time
Before the weight, without the weight.
Days passed so. And then it brought your head low.

That is how I came upon you, nodding into the lye
Suds above the tub. Because I cannot bear
To see your brilliance thus dimmed, I pretend
This is another role you have hidden yourself
Within; she is listening, she will report all--
But there is no one here to hear.

I reach my hand across the table
To cover yours. Because I cannot bear to see
Your brilliance thus dimmed, I will write
Your story. You will tell them who you are.
There may be some repayment in it.
You do not want promises, and
I do not want to lie.
We will be free or we will die.

Photo: By the way? If you want to BUY the book, go nuts on Amazon.com or Politics & Prose! If you want it but you're really strapped for cash, I have some copies at cost that I am happy to sell.