Poets are Lovers

A long time ago--almost a year--Ella's Wonder Wednesday #14 Regifting at Poets United asked for favorite poems.  I returned there today for Kim's Verse First ~ Writers are Lovers

using one of my Gift Poems for inspiration.  A pretty great place, Poets United! 

Adrienne Rich (right), with writer Audre Lorde(left) and Meridel Le Sueur (middle) in Austin Texas, 1980

In this photograph, two writers who influence(d) me greatly frame a legendary writer and thinker they helped to rediscover in the 1960s.  I first read their work in the 1970s. Today I focus on Adrienne Rich.  After she died on 27 March 2012, writer and friend Marge Piercy wrote this:

Another obituary

 We were filled with the strong wine

of mutual struggle, one joined loud

and sonorous voice.  We carried

each other along revolting, chanting,

cursing, crafting, making all new.

First Muriel, then Audre and Flo,

now Adrienne.  I feel like a lone

pine remnant of virgin forest

when my peers have met the ax

and I weep ashes.

Yes, young voices are stirring now

the wind is rising, the sea boils

again, yet I feel age sucking

the marrow from my bones,

the loneliness of memory.

Their voices murmur in my inner

ear but never will I hear them

speak new words and no matter

how I cherish what they gave us

I want more, I still want more.

                                                                         

Copyright 2012 Marge Piercy

I do too.  
Listen for one minute and forty seconds:

Poet/lover: Adrienne Rich

Hers is the voice I meditate to, me safely tucked

into the edges of dread while she translates

their calculated disguises, images and sounds

for humans like me who still hug trees and listen

to poems she creates of the unspeakable—

What?

Yes, yes.

She died at age eighty-one back in twenty twelve

but she was so far ahead that

it will take us decades to catch up.

And her voice still purrs out strength from You Tube

So

I will still call her present, invoke her presence,

love her madly and enter her landscapes, listing

her titles as song:

The Will to Change, Diving into the Wreck

and The Dream of a Common Language led

me to Twenty-one Love Poems where I bled

and stayed through the radical seventies

A Wild Patience has Taken Me This Far

ushered in the studious eighties, when I

reentered the academy and abandoned

her and other lovers until now as I stand

To re-enter the edges, I listen for her voice—

she will talk of trees, doorframes and this difficult world,

speak utter truth from her salvaged skin to

my bag of bones so I will bleed and breathe 
and sigh and love and make love again.

Posted for Kim's Verse First ~ Writers are Lovers at Poets United.  Oh!  Can you believe that The Paris Review just this minute re-posted their interview with Adrienne Rich, "Adrienne Rich on ‘Tonight No Poetry Will Serve’ " on Facebook??  Here's the Facebook post:

“The split in our language between ‘political’ and ‘personal’ has, I think, been a trap.” —Adrienne Rich  

Read our 2011 interview with the American poet here: http://tpr.ly/hK3j0y

Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast

"Dog Songs," a new book by Mary Oliver

From:   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/books/mary-olivers-dog-songs-finds-poetry-in-friends.html?smid=pl-share

Scratching a Muse’s Ears

Mary Oliver’s ‘Dog Songs’ Finds Poetry in Friends

Angel Valentin for The New York Times

The poet Mary Oliver with Ricky, one comforting presence in her new collection, “Dog Songs.”

By DANA JENNINGS

Published: October 6, 2013

Mary Oliver has spent most of her life with a mind ripe with poems — and with at least one steadfast dog by her side. It seems fitting then that her latest collection revels in the carrying on of dogs. “Dog Songs,” out from Penguin Press on Tuesday, is a sweet golden retriever of a book that curls up with the reader, with 35 poems and one essay about the dogs who have shared Ms. Oliver’s days.

Angel Valentin for The New York Times

The poet Mary Oliver, with Ricky, a Havanese who plays a part in her latest collection, “Dog Songs.”

Ms. Oliver is that rare thing in our culture: a best-selling writer of poems. Her previous collection, “A Thousand Mornings,” was a hardcover best seller last year, and “Dog Songs” has already bounded as high as No. 2 on Amazon’s poetry list (behind a 99-cent Kindle edition of Poe).

Asked about it in a recent phone interview, Ms. Oliver sounded as bewildered as anybody: “Best seller? That part I can’t get. It amazes me.”

She has an inkling, though, about why the ordinary readers who buy her books fasten on her poems. “People want poetry,” she said. “They need poetry. They get it. They don’t want fancy work.”

At 78, Ms. Oliver, whose first book arrived in 1963, is the kind of old-fashioned poet who walks the woods most days, accompanied by dog and notepad. “Dogs are perfect companions,” she said. “They don’t speak.”

Her poems’ titles make it clear that nature suffuses and sustains her work: “White Heron Rises Over Blackwater,” “Truro, the Blueberry Fields,” “Old Goldenrod at Field’s Edge.” As does this from “Mindful” in the 2004 collection “Why I Wake Early”:

Every day

I see or I hear

something

that more or less

kills me

with delight.

The poet David Rivard, who teaches at the University of New Hampshire, said he believes that Ms. Oliver’s popularity dovetails with the fact she writes about the outdoors. “As a nature poet, Oliver feeds people’s love of a certain pastoral tradition in poetry,” Mr. Rivard, whose latest collection is “Otherwise Elsewhere,” wrote in an e-mail.

Besides nature, Ms. Oliver’s muses include the poets Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov and Pablo Neruda, and, of course, dogs — a mob of dogs — many of them coursing and chorusing through “Dog Songs”: Bear and Ben, Ricky and Lucy, Luke and Percy.

And the book transcends its dogginess. It’s also about love, impermanence and the tears in things. As Ms. Oliver asks in “School,” “How many summers does a little dog have?”

But why write a book of dog poems? Enough canine lit has come out in recent years that a shelter should be built for those tomes that have been neutered and remaindered. Ms. Oliver sheepishly admits that the idea for “Dog Songs” came from her publisher and agent.

Still, she addresses the dog-poetry question in her essay “Dog Talk”: “They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.” That Ms. Oliver has a book of dog poems will surely make the poets and critics who sneer at her work howl. Though she has won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, her verse splits the poetic microcosm — a world in which a best-selling poet is always below suspicion.

Typical of the howlers is the poet and critic David Orr, who once wrote of Ms. Oliver’s work in The New York Times Book Review, “One can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it.” When asked about those allergic to her work, one could almost hear Ms. Oliver shrug over the phone: “It’s a kind of eliteness among academics.”

Mr. Rivard wrote, “There are some people who believe that plain-spoken language is always a sign of simple-mindedness, or worse, of a middlebrow, uncool character.” He added: “At her best, she’s a fine poet, one whose work I admire. When she’s not on her game, the work feels too easy.”

The California poet R. M. Ryan, whose latest book is “Vaudeville in the Dark,” said: “So many poets obscure the world. Mary Oliver clarifies it.”

In a sense, her poems, with their charity and lyric clarity, can provide the kind of solace that dogs give. ”I think they are companions in a way that people aren’t,” Ms. Oliver said. “They’ll lie next to you when you’re sad. And they remind us that we’re animals, too.”

Most of her tail-shaking companions got to spend their splendid ephemeral summers in Provincetown, Mass., where Ms. Oliver lived for 50 years, though she has just migrated to a town on the southeastern coast of Florida. She declined to be more specific because she’s a poet — in another cultural rarity — whose starry-eyed fans show up uninvited on her doorstep like strays.

“One time a stranger came to the house and asked if I was Mary Oliver,” she said, laughing. “And I said, ‘No, I’m not Mary Oliver.’ “

She grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio, near Cleveland, and even as a child she had a dog with whom she tripped and tramped the woods. “Her name was Tippy, and she had white at the tip of her tail,” Ms. Oliver said. “She was a puppy who showed up at my great-aunt’s door, and she made a gift of her to me.”

Then there was the dog whom Ms. Oliver once gave as a gift. Before her partner of 40 years, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, died in 2005, she told Ms. Oliver, “I want a little dog that I can hold in my arms.” She craved what Ms. Oliver calls “a bundle of longing” to see her through. That bundle was Percy, a frisky bichon frisé named for the poet Shelley.

She and Ms. Cook once had as many as four dogs, a couple of cats and a rabbit, but these days Ms. Oliver is down to Ricky, a plucky Havanese who punctuated our call with his friendly racket. “Ricky loves me,” she said. “And the Havanese have such a wonderful sense of life.”

But love does have its needs. When Ricky’s charm couldn’t get his mistress’s attention, his need escalated. As our talk ended, Ms. Oliver exclaimed: “Good lord! This dog is ripping up something!” Then she laughed.

Ms. Oliver’s pleasure in Ricky’s antics again evoked “Dog Talk”: “Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 7, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Scratching a Muse’s Ears.

What I Learned This Week

Acknowledgement:  In dVerse Poets Pub's Pretzels&Bullfights this week, poet Brian Miller asked us to speak to these questions:  "What did you learn this week? What is rocking your world? What pissed you off—or made your day?” His own poignant story is there.  Mine follows:

     This week I learned the kinds of questions writers ask editors and agents.  I participated in the Barrelhouse Conversations & Connections one-day Conference in Philadelphia, my first time attending a gathering as a writer.  While there I also took one of my poems to speed date with an editor.  What an eye-opener!  I wasn't the only oldie-newbie, but many more attendees were from MFA creative writing programs near and far.  All were so puppy-like and hopeful.  I hope I seemed more simply curious. The eagerness was both scary and beautiful.  So many people for so few "jobs."  How to survive as a drop in this ocean?  

     Answer: We gotta be ourselves--and I mean BE REAL and become real: Find our topics and voice and put teeth in our lines.  Gotta love the industry fiercely or/and hone in on the home team and relax.  That's the beautiful part.

     Here's the scary part: I know I cannot compete.  I cannot send out hundreds of submissions, thousands of inquiry letters, millions of copies and keep track of who's got what.  But I cannot quit either.  So I will not try to compete.  Paradox?

     Even the agents at the conference said to stay focused on the writing and don't worry about the rest until we have to.  The writing is the work, and the agent--should we ever acquire one--will do the rest.  But neither the agent nor the editor can write truths from our perspective.  Of course, we heard helpful tips in finding agents, editors, publishers and etc.  But the biggest tip for me was to go home and write, taking all the risks I am afraid to take, including not knowing whether or not I will succeed. 

     Writers, Poets, Artists et al.:  What did you learn this week?

a plague of plagiarism.

• I allude to songs, hymns, psalms, and other writers through using their words in contexts of my own, but do not believe I am plagiarizing.  And in the 20-teens, with mashups as a factor of creativity,  it is hard to teach high school students and draw the definitive line around what plagiarism is and isn't.  Here's an article from The Australian that got me rethinking this entire mess. 

  
  

  Comment?

  
  

  Plagiarism scandal exposes toxic undercurrents in poetry scene  by STEPHEN ROMEI

• THE AUSTRALIAN
• SEPTEMBER 21, 2013   12:00AM

DAILY readers of this newspaper may have seen a story I wrote on September 13 (a Black Friday for some) about a plagiarism scandal involving Newcastle-based poet Andrew Slattery.  [The original story is here.]

The award-winning poet admitted he had been inserting lines from other poets - including famous ones such as Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski and Seamus Heaney - into his own work. (He also "borrowed" from prose writers, including Romanian Emil Cioran, which I mention in passing because I have such fond memories of my younger self reading On the Heights of Despair.)

Slattery said he was striving for a cento format, where the works of other writers are inserted into new poems, but I suspect this was a half-hearted defence, and certainly it was one no one was buying. Ultimately, he admitted he had done the wrong thing.

The story sparked a vigorous debate in poetry circles and the wider literary community. In a long and stimulating article on the Overland website, Justin Clemens makes many good points, including one that immediately occurred to me: how did Slattery's deception go undetected for so long? How did prize judges, often poets themselves, not spot lines from Heaney, say, in Slattery's work? " ... all the judges and editors and aesthetes ... have been left with poetic egg on their faces," Clemens writes.

Slattery was widely published, including in this newspaper. "The victims," Clemens observes, "have come from all colours of the political and aesthetic spectrums. It seems Slattery has taken in almost everybody, from internationally famous poets ... through academic specialists and journal editors and media hacks, not to mention a more general and diffuse readership."

The continuing fallout from this affair has exposed some toxic undercurrents in the Australian poetry scene. You can bet your bottom dollar the work of a lot of poets has been run through online search engines since Black Friday, being checked for plagiarism.

You can also wager with confidence that some of the people doing the checking are fellow poets. How many poets this makes nervous is something I do not know. If you missed my original story, you can find it, and also Clemens's piece, on my professional Facebook page, which I've been meaning to mention for a while. This is a public page so you don't have to be my "friend" to look at it.www.facebook.com/stephenromei

Three Minutes

From ABC News:

House Honors Birmingham Church Bombing Victims

@GoldmanRussell

By Russell Goldman

Apr 25, 2013 4:49pm

The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted unanimously to honor four young Alabama girls, killed in a 1963 church bombing. Martin Luther King Jr. had called them  ”martyrs” of the civil rights movement.

The girls, all black members of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, will be posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the country’s highest civilian honors, created by an act of Congress.

Addie Mae Collins, 14; Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; and Cynthia Wesley; 14, were killed on Sept 15, 1963,  in the attack that struck the packed church on a Sunday morning. Twenty-two others were injured.

The bomb, composed of dynamite and a timer, was planted beneath the front steps of the church,  outside a basement room in which 26 children attended a Sunday school sermon.

FIND MORE OF THIS STORY HERE: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/04/congress-honors-birmingham-bomb-victims/

Three Minutes

Four young ones

died yesterday

and yesterday

and yesterday

Seems like yesterday

when four girls died

and four more

and four more

Today, too, death

more died today

while praising and

singing and walking

Bombing children anywhere 

is bombing children 

here in this 

safe heart.

Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast

Peaceable Kingdom

I was thrilled to see this, an 11-minute segment of a documentary-in-production on the Religious Society of Friends.  It's exciting because it avoids the pitfall of mythologizing.  For example, whereas it reveals Quaker involvement with abolition it does not obscure the fact that some Quakers owned slaves and were the first "targets" of Quakers who came to know that ownership of people was against the right order of God.  





I am not collecting money for this documentary which will play on PBS, but I am supporting it in every way I can.  

I am a Quaker in Philadelphia, PA, a city founded by William Penn within territory he received from the King of England.  His statue is on top of City Hall, and yet many here do not know of Penn or the Quaker faith.  

In contemporary USA there are any different flavors of Quaker stemming from the historical tradition provided in this clip.  For silent-meeting universalists like myself, the more conservative and talkative branches seem strangely fundamental next to my own experience of that of God in all people and the equality between continuous revelation and the Biblical Word.   I look forward to seeing how this documentary explains the differences as well as our common work toward a peaceable kingdom and the end of all war. 

Unfinished Poem

                                     (for Amy M-K)

I wake into giving thoughts,

day already blooming for me

(if I am ready to receive

it without hesitation)

I rise into givens, catching

as much as possible with mitts

(protecting my hands, hands shielding

my heart, eyes closed, peeking)

I will, I promise daily, learn

to receive Light bare handed

(and uncover my heart, and   

worship with eyes open)

Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast

Posted at dVerse Poets Pub OpenLinkNight Week 112.

Labor Day 2013

(My poem "Labor Day 2013" is HERE.)

The skies opened and rain, rain, RAINED.  Stopped for a minute, and now pour again.  My daily Facebook is filled with reminders of union actions that made the USA a better place to work and warnings about upcoming legislation that turns some of that around.  To me, reading the history of labor unions while watching governments dissolve them is poignant and energizing. Democracy is powerful when its people engage in it and apply their voting and veto and marching-to-be heard powers.


From Wikipedia where you can read much more:

     In the US, Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of their country.
     In many countries, the working classes sought to make May Day an official holiday, and their efforts largely succeeded. In the United States and Canada, however, the official holiday for workers is Labor Day in September. This day was promoted by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, who organized the first parade in New York City. After the Haymarket Massacre, US President Grover Cleveland feared that commemorating Labor Day on May 1 could become an opportunity to commemorate the affair. Thus, in 1887, it was established as an official holiday in September to support the Labor Day that the Knights favored.

Today's New York Times Opinion Section, re-ran Cindy Hahamovitch's " "The Lessons of Belle Glade" originally published July 18, 2013.  A historian, Ms. Hahamovitch provides context for understanding the latest migrant worker options pending in Congress.  Read the article; it's powerful.

I wish an equally clear context was available for current legislation that feels to me like attacks on teachers and our unions.  While union reform is necessary, the union breaking and economics involved with funding education seems to be political and not related to any policy present and past.  Correct me if I am wrong.

Please help me find clear readings providing an historical context for today's impoverishment of education that ultimately affects children, families, and the future of this nation.

(My poem "Labor Day 2013" is HERE.)

(I am aware that I left weapons out of this poem,  over-
simplifying the tactics of terrorists and tyrants.  
I pray for safety in the Labor Day streets 
of the USA and elsewhere.)

Thrills and Chills

Susan Chast

37 minutes ago near Philadelphia · 

• I am so excited! My first poem to be published in the pages of a real book is “Word Wrapping” in The dVerse Anthology: Voices of Contemporary World Poetry, edited by Frank Watson. Plum White Press, 2013; P. 151. Hurrah. My poem faces one by Laurie Harris Kolp and is practically in the center of poems by poets who have been reading my work as it develops. Visit us at dVerse Poets Pub .

  
  

            The above is my status on Facebook today.  One little poem in one 269-page paper-back publication is making my heart beat fast.  Frank Watson did a great job with layout, order and style, right down to the feel of the paper--not the most expensive--but smooth to the touch.  And these matters of design are important to me as I consider self-publishing a full collection and a chapbook by early next year.  Can I do it?  

            I believe I can, but I'd like to finish the first draft of my novel first.  The poetry books can be the rewards.  Not that the steps of making any book are easy, but it is a work reward for doing good work.  Having just soaked up the wisdom of writers Marge Piercy (my hero) and Ira Wood all weekend up at Omega Institute, I am revved up to treat the act of writing more seriously while maintaining the light tone of the book.  I think.  I think it needs the light tone as it addresses serious matters, but the experience of the Piercy/Wood Memoir Workshop Lab  may alter that. 

            The last piece I wrote about my friend Doug's death is mainly serious and would not easily be translated into my fiction. Nor should it be. Something new is emerging, popping out from behind my privacy screens energetically and eagerly.  Why?  Will it wait for another book?  Or will it shove the one I have started into the back of the file drawer where I keep 50+ years of false starts?

            In my autobiographical novel, so far, I emphasize my theatre and feminist experience in the character of an aging performance artist and storyteller who is being pressured to break her safe routine and isolation by three unforeseen events:  (1) She has been invited to the 30th reunion of her old Women's Center and Theatre Company, both of which ended existence in the 1980s.  (2) She has been asked to update and publish her ancient 1990 dissertation now that her artistic director subject, Ellen Stewart, has died.  (3) Her favorite audience member, Greg, has just lost his mother to the struggle in Afghanistan.   These three events cause enough conflict to expose her experience with racism, feminism, lesbianism, community, theatre, and love's concurrent losses and needs. That is already a lot without drugs and suicides and sex and secretly transgendered lives. I don't lack for material and research to open up the culture of radical change and the stagnation of feminist community in the late 1970s and early 80s.

           In the next phase of writing I will re-outline, I think, in an attempt to separate the story lines so I can satisfy them all and let them re-entwine.  Then if I have to include love and sex to make the work sing I will.  But I really hope it isn't necessary.

  
  

            That's all for now--writing to think, thinking to write. The UPS wagon came down the street today and left a book with one of my poems in it at my feet.  Yip-pee!  I forgot to eat, but I'll go and do that now.
  
  

  

  I just sent this to dVerse Poets Pub where a gallery is growing.

  
  Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast

  
  

  
  

Marge Piercy Assignment #2-3

This is a Marge Piercy and Ira Wood  assignment to write a dialogue that passes time, uses action and descriptive tags, and contains indirect as well as direct dialogue.  I chose the moment in my life when I got Very Bad News.

Doug's Death

      The phone's ring stirred me from a half sleep in my cozy Williamsburg bedroom. I was tired and achy from a day of digging over a new garden patch and plowing through plagiarized research papers, seeking the good stems among the weeds. Pulled by the phone, I wrapped a blanket around myself, scuffled to the kitchen, jerked the phone off the wall and nearly barked my hello.

      "Hi, Susan. This is Tom calling from Berkeley."

      His familiar voice brought out my smile. "Oh! Hi Tom. It's been a long time."

      "Are you sitting down?"

      "No. Barely standing. Do you know what time it is? How's Debbie and Doug?"

      "Susan, whoa. Sit down, OK?"

      "OK ...?" I say, putting my knee on a kitchen chair.

      "Are you sitting?"

      "Yes. Come on, friend, you're scaring me."

      "Doug is dead."

      I sank onto the hard chair, heart pounding so loud in my throat that I couldn't open my mouth.

      "Susan?"

      "No."

      "Yes, Susan. Doug died tonight. He had a massive heart attack and died before his friend Bob could take two steps toward him."

      "No."

      A woman's voice wound through my drumming. "Susan, are you alone? Is there someone you could call?"

      "Debbie, what's going on? This isn't funny."

      "I know."

      Damn. She was crying. Matter-of-fact Debbie was crying, I thought to the rhythm of the drum beat in my ears.

      "This can't be true, Debbie, this can't ... it's been so long since he and I talked. He can't be gone."

      Pause. "He loved you, Susan," she said quietly.

      "But he broke up with me seven months ago! We haven't even talked!"

      Pause. "What are you talking about? Just yesterday we were all talking about how we missed you, and Doug was saying how important you were to him..."

      "He didn't tell you."

      "No. He would've if it were true."

      "But it is! Because I wanted us to marry. Because he said it would never happen. Over the phone, Debbie."

      "Doug is dead, Susan. We don't know what to do, call his dad, arrange a burial, have a party. We think Doug would want a party."

      "Call his Dad and let him arrange to .... Deb, Doug wanted his body to go to science. Can you tell his Dad that?"

      "Yes."

      "I'll arrange something at the college. Deb, I can be there within two days."

      "Come home, Susan."

      So I did.

      Doug and I were both 46 years old. We had been together since I became a student at UC BErkeley and cast him in a play 8 years earlier. I needed to see his body to believe he was gone.

      His Dad arranged a viewing in the back room of a funeral home where Doug's naked and refrigerated body waited under a sheet. He had a look of surprise on his face that was not un-peaceful. he had lipstick on his lips and eye shadow, just like Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When the funeral director handed me the bundle of black leather and piercing rings that emergency workers had cut from his body, I believed he was dead. Tom had walked with me into the back room while Debbie and Dad waited out front. They wanted to remember him as he had been, not how he was now.

      "He would have liked this," Tom observed. "A rapid death in front of a Goth Club called the Terminator, lots of drama. The viewing in back of a funeral parlor, your readings over his corpse. Doug was nothing if not an actor."

I had to agree.

      And now the tasks. Doug's Dad wanted me to find the new car not yet paid for and return it to the dealer. Left on the street for more than 24 hours, it had been towed to the impound lot. A ransom would have to be paid to free it. By the time time Tom and I found it within row after row of cars by the San Francisco Bay, Tom had me laughing too. How Doug would have loved this!

      And then came the task of taking apart his apartment. Debbie came with me. I unlocked the door to find myself everywhere in pictures and opened letters mixed in with marijuana and ecstasy and fen-fen, and then I cried thinking that Doug had considered suicide--or at least an early death--when love just might have been enough. I took only a small carpet Doug had told me stories about and the coffee table he had designed and mocked up, a manufacturing line in mind.

      Tom sold all of Doug's woodworking tools and saws and machines, and bought drugs and wine and snacks to throw a huge party like an Irish Wake. Doug's body was not there, but I had rented a car to fetch his father.

      And then I left Tom and Debbie's house to spend one last night at Doug's. I lit candles everywhere and wrapped myself naked in our favorite quilt. I curled into his bed and felt him there, alive and laughing, red hair standing up every which way, and him refusing, as always, to coddle my excess emotion. "It won't work," I heard him saying. "I'm gone, Susan. Let me go. It was a good death. I loved you." And I replied, "Doug, I love your restless experimental soul. But you were right, I wouldn't have had your drugs in my home, and your Gothic fantasies went further than I could go. I'm glad you felt free before you died, baby. I will miss you. Go." I dried my eyes, and fell asleep peacefully in his scent and warmth. In the morning I dressed in his jeans and favorite shirt.  

     Today I would fly back to Virginia to resume my teaching duties in the theatre department at the College of William in Mary. In a month, I would get my first anti-depressants when I could not be in a rehearsal without crying. In a year I would try to move on.  I still look for him in the crowd scenes of movies, I still use his coffee table, I still stand on his rug, I still wear his jeans, but they are getting tight.

 Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast

Homework for Marge Piercy

I'm at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, writing a one page or one paragraph seductive dynamic opening for a memoir.  I will receive feedback on this in an hour or two in my class with Marge Piercy and Ira Wood:  

          The dark and dirty circle swirled and deepened like a clay pot on its wheel, fingers raising the edges and deepening the hole--but it is a recurring nightmare and the hole was a pit I fell into.  "Mommy!" I called, and Dad came running to me half dressed, I suspect to get me before  I wet the bed and all the bedding would need to be changed.
          At 62, I still have this dream occasionally though it doesn't panic me anymore.  I know about Alice and wonderland, Orpheus and Erudice, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, and every science fiction/fantasy writer and would-be Lord of the Rings the English-speaking world has to offer.  And I think about the 7-year old I was  discovering imagination and storytelling and faith in ceiling tiles a leg-length away from the top bunk.  This was my private space unless I fell asleep and the nightmare came.

Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast

 

  

The Drones and the Zimmermen

I read Octavia McBride-Ahebee' s blog because she is an accessible local poet with a powerful voice.  She tells the truth through art that tears through the fog and the will to be blind.  In her post today, Octavia asks Obama to put himself in the place of drone victims as well in the place of Trayvon Martin.   In my mind, the drone program is also Racial Profiling.  (See Guilty, Not, my previous post on this blog.)   

Octavia McBride-Ahebee's posting today introduced a poet new to me, Solmaz Sharif.  In his poem "Drone," he personalized an attack and I saw the connection.  Go to her blog--click on the bold title below--read the poem!  Come on back and let's talk.


Octavia McBride-Ahebee: Drone by Solmaz Sharif:     Victims of Drones   I am horrified by the Zimmerman verdict. I am equally confounded not by President Obama’s response to the ve...