I will write this up better, soon.  Until then, what about you?

So tomorrow, out at LCCC is the workshop with Shacochis and Bullock.  Please note I have refrained from making any obvious Sex Pistol references, for now.   David Romtvedt, our poet Laureate will also be attending and I don’t want to get everyone all het up for naught, but I am hoping that David brings his accordian, Bullock a banjo and Shacochis brings some radical Sage Francis- style wordsmith rapping into play.  This, reader, is how I get my heart broken; expecting too much.  It is worth noting that in addition to writing some kick ass books of poetry, David is also in the band the Fireants.  I went looking for a mp3 or video clip of the band but came up with nothing.  That’s not true, I came upon a band named the Fire Ants that have an album titled, “Indian Transvestite.”  Imagine my chagrin.

Saturday at 10:30 is the big, big event.  As always I am going to practice deep breathing and repeat my steadying mantra, “you will not get kicked out of this event for inappropriately touching the guests.” Say it with me.  The closest I’ve ever come to breaking this rule is the year Honoree Jeffers was here and in fairness to me, she was wearing a very sparkly gold shirt that anyone in their right mind would have wanted to caress.  While muttering how sublime you found her poetry…

I am feeling like a lucky, lucky duck to be surrounded by such world class literary stars in good old Cheyenne. I hope to see you all there.  I’ll be the idiot grinning like the Cheshire cat and trying to look casual, by turns.

I don’t want to give too much away because I want to write lots after the discussion but I am, as ever, in awe of good writing and how it leads us to discover new meaning in texts we’ve read a million times and every poem that is added to our conscience (well, not every poem; every good poem,) seems to deepen our understanding of even the most mundane daily activities, and fleeting emotions grow concrete and real when named so perfectly.  I am thinking of Elizabeth Bishop’s In the Waiting Room which is about waiting for an aunt to have her teeth fixed at the Dentist’s office.  If you write to tell me that no, it is about death, Zen existentialism and rebirth I will agree but will also insist that it is very much also about waiting in a dentist’s office for your aunt to have her teeth fixed.

We will be reading the Bishop poem with the Addonizio poem, Salmon.  In this way we can establish our high minded literary credentials before we go crashing headlong into all of the explicit sex, drinking and carousing of her other poems.  If you write to tell me that sex, drinking and carousing are base and have no business in poetry I will remind you that they are metaphors for death, Zen existentialism and rebirth.

Oh! Don’t I sound serious?  “I will remind you”?  Well, being defensive on behalf of poetry is probably the least of my sins and since we know that no less a figure than Stephen Dedalus  gets the snot beat out of him for defending that decedent atheist, Lord Byron, in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, we are in good company.

Hope to see lots of you this afternoon.  Hope to read lots of your brilliant comments later. Click below for a link to In the Waiting Room.

In the Waiting Room 

In this shallow creek

they flop and writhe forward as the dead 

float back toward them. Oh, I know

what I should say: fierce burning in the body 

as her eggs burst free, milky cloud 

of sperm as he quickens them. I should stand

on the bridge with my camera, 

frame the white froth of rapids where one 

arcs up for an instant in its final grace.

But I have to go down among 

the rocks the glacier left 

and squat at the edge of the water

where a stinking pile of them lies, 

where one crow balances and sinks 

its beak into a gelid eye.

I have to study the small holes 

gouged into their skin, their useless gills, 

their gowns of black flies. I can't

make them sing. I want to, 

but all they do is open 

their mouths a little wider

so the water pours in 

until I feel like I'm drowning. 

On the bridge the tour bus waits

and someone waves, and calls down 

It's time, and the current keeps lifting 

dirt from the bottom to cover the eggs.

         for Aya at fifteen 

Damp-haired from the bath, you drape yourself
upside down across the sofa, reading,
one hand idly sunk into a bowl
of crackers, goldfish with smiles stamped on.
I think they are growing gills, swimming
up the sweet air to reach you. Small girl,
my slim miracle, they multiply.
In the black hours when I lie sleepless,
near drowning, dread-heavy, your face
is the bright lure I look for, love's hook
piercing me, hauling me cleanly up.

I want a red dress. 

I want it flimsy and cheap, 

I want it too tight, I want to wear it 

until someone tears it off me. 

I want it sleeveless and backless, 

this dress, so no one has to guess 

what's underneath. I want to walk down

the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store 

with all those keys glittering in the window, 

past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old 

donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers 

slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, 

hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. 

I want to walk like I'm the only 

woman on earth and I can have my pick. 

I want that red dress bad.

I want it to confirm 

your worst fears about me, 

to show you how little I care about you 

or anything except what 

I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment 

from its hanger like I'm choosing a body 

to carry me into this world, through 

the birth-cries and the love-cries too, 

and I'll wear it like bones, like skin, 

it'll be the goddamned 

dress they bury me in.

Library:
3/3: “Tell Me” by Kim Addonizio

3/24: “The Immaculate Invasion” by Bob Shacochis

4/14: “Bee Season” by Myla Goldberg

City News:
2/11/07 Wickett’s Remedy ” by Myla Goldberg

3/4/07 Creatures of Habit by Jill McCorkle

4/1/07 The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio