week eight

How much rain? The Rillito River floods its banks. Last time it did that Clifton flooded out too. Which is how I ended up here, wherever I am.

***

Unplugging now.

***

. . . . . . .

Leaving tomorrow afternoon for Puerto Penasco, Mexico. Packing a bathing suit, a summer dress, sunblock, many books, that's about all. Maybe a hat. I expect to have sand in all of those places by evening. No time to waste. We'll only be there a few days.

Sea of Cortez. Tidal pools.

***

. . . . . .

Casa Libre en la Solana: Jonah the resident kissing cat went straight for Charlie when we settled into chairs on the little enclosed terrace in Casa's entryway before the reading. Simmons brought cheeses, a selection of crackers, lemon tea cookies, honeydew, cantaloupe, pineapple, I don't know what else, and many bottles of wine, and we put these with the guacamole and blue and white tortilla chips on a table nearly overwhelmed by a big soft fern. Wrought iron gates, a potted aloe by the library entrance, lanterns and candles, bricked floor, adobe stucco, red wood doors, and when I looked up, a lattice of palms (saguaro ribs? ocotillo?) over the beams of the roof and the late afternoon light winking through the screen of leaves.

***

Eduardo brought Charlie and Josh with him (best company I can imagine, these three, on that dull two hours between Phoenix and Tucson) so the five of us ate a meal together across the street before setting up and I couldn't get over their faces and voices. Seeing Simmons and Eduardo again, Charlie for the first time, and meeting Josh (whose book and blog are forthcoming--look for them). Well.

Wonderful, all of them.

***

Casa's keepers--its founders and directors--my heroes. They've made a gorgeous magical home for writers--an extension of their home--in my favorite part of Tucson, and they're working very hard. Send them support, send them your residency application. Both. But do it.

We toured the suites after the reading. The red kitchen with the great white gas stove and the chairs you upholstered yourselves and the tile-marked concrete floor, I'd cook and write for days in that room alone. Thank you, Ann and Kristen.

***

It rained that morning, remember? The sun came out and warmed the water in the air and the standing puddles in the streets, and though there was a cool breeze outside, the people fanned themselves in the mugginess. --Cold bottles of blush wine and water wilting the tablecloth with condensation. --The crackers too by the end of the night, Simmons pointed out, wilting. We read over the drone of the window cooler with the help of a mic. The ceiling fan in the library did what it could. Eduardo joked during his reading that he needed only his James Brown cape to complete his impersonation. This is the desert. We are grateful for rain but we're not used to it.

***

I read between them. What an honor.

***

. . . . .

. . . .

Woke to rain, so rare here in summer, morning rain, I'd forgotten it happens. My first thought: how will I run? And then of course: run in the rain. Which will let up in a few hours anyway. It smells so good. Dust and water, rain-wait and relief. This I miss most: you can count on it.

***

Reading today. I am making guacamole. I'm cutting those twelve perfect avocados open in just a few minutes. Tomatoes, garlic, cilantro, oregano. Chile tepin. Simmons is bringing wine and cheese. Eduardo is driving all the way from Tumbleweed to read for you. You should come if you can. I'd like to see you at last.

***

We lunched at Neo yesterday. Tofu beef shrimp chicken pork in claypot. Lychee sherbet. Exquisite. And Myrna drove the four of us in her new convertible Saab. Closest I've come to that feeling is riding around in the back of a pickup truck. Before car seats. You know.

***

Also, I bought this from the Desert Museum's cook book collection when we went last Saturday night in search of black-lit scorpions and moths in the moth garden. Gorgeous love food. Can't wait to cook for you.

***

The guac is hot. I made it while talking to Herman on the phone. We talked a long time. I miss him.

***

. . .

"Make me a dress that looks like this. Oh you have material for two. Make me two."

"Okay, chipilona, do I have a few days or do you need it right away?"

"I want to wear the yellow one Thursday."

"The orange is very pretty."

"It's not really orange. I think it's salmon."

"Sal-mon."

"The l is silent. Salmon."

"Oh yes. I hear it better now. Salmon. Well then Thursday. I will cut them and sew them very fast. If you do not want the green I will cut the green for me."

"I don't want the green. Though it's a gorgeous green. But the original is green."

"Okay well I think the green is very cute. But I will use it to practice so yours come out okay."

"They'll come out beautiful. Everything always does."

"Hmf. You say. But you know what it is to practice and have it turn out very ugly."

"I do. Yes."

"And it hurts more when the practice is for somebody else."

***

. .

In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, and lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hipocrene, were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming" Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh 'aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Nay certain introductions, similies, and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction. Among the similies, there was, I remember, that of the Manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well with too many subjects; in which however it yielded the palm at once to the example of Alexander and Clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus!--Flattery? Alexander and Clytus!--Anger ? Drunkenness? Pride? Friendship? Ingratitude? Late repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises of agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation, that had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old friend was banished by public edict in secula seculorum. I have sometimes ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index expurgatorius of certain well known and ever returning phrases, both introductory, and transitional, including the large assortment of modest egotisms, and flattering illeisms, &c. &c. might be hung up in our law-courts, and both houses of parliament, with great advantage to the public, as an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to his Majesty's ministers, but above all, as insuring the thanks of country attornies, and their clients, who have private bills to carry through the house.

--Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chapter I

***

week seven

"Where was the biggest earthquake in the world, where did that take place?" Part of a string of infinite questions, all summer this thread of what-is superlatives, the tallest buildings in the world the biggest mountains in the world the biggest jets in the world the biggest tornadoes in the world. When not at google he's at one of us, the atlas in one hand. He drafts elaborate cities of towers, massive hotels hospitals apartment complexes office buildings airports streets and highways, all with names, he builds them in a day, destroys them in a day. The city of bridges--"every tower has a bridge so we can walk in the sky"--we lost to terrorist airplanes. Xian drowned in a hurricane.

"What is the biggest thing in the world?"

"What do you mean? On this planet?"

"Yes."

"The ocean I suppose."

"No I mean thing. What's the biggest thing?"

Exhausting because inexhaustable. The top twenty becomes the top two hundred. A pad of paper run through one afternoon, forty-six towers. "I will go to sleep and dream of my beautiful cities." No stories, no populations, no time in which these structures exist. They are built, they are extinguished.

"Where was the biggest earthquake in the world, where did that take place."

"I don't know." Exasperated in that glad you're so interested but can we talk about something else for a change kind of way. She is just done with lunch, laundry, bills, the baby fighting her nap. Now dinner. The dishwasher. The monolithic days.

"You don't know much, do you."

We played trivial pursuit one morning, the three of us during nap time. He is a formidable contender, in geography, science, history. Up to now, innocent of it.

"I know a lot. More than you do. I might be the smartest kid in the world, or at least in North America."

No we say in unison and laugh, no no. Everyone has their talents we say. And there are many forms of knowledge. Some you are good at, some you'll need to work on. Like modesty, we half joke. He is building structures in his head, half listening. He is unconvinced. We are very small in his towering cities of glass and steel. He can hardly hear us from where his buildings sway in their foundations. "You don't know much do you." The city against the storm.

"What is the biggest thing in the world?"

It is not the ocean. Though its vastness often triumphs.

***

Ran that bitch. Damn straight. One hundred degrees, baby, and the last big hill of the last leg.

***

Archie Ammons once sat me down in his big stuffed office chair and read this passage to me:

What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poem? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. A poet, described in *ideal* perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) *fuses*, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (*laxis effertur habenis* [it is carried onwards with loose reins]) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.

--Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chapter xiv

***

. . . . .

Please? William Carlos Williams' "Aigeltinger"--help me out. Anything you know.

***

. . . .

Marvel of being home, how quiet my head becomes. What You overhear so often while listening from the eaves is the reverberating noise of too many things happening at once. It spills over. Here. And now my whole attention is on the thing at hand and there is enough room in my life for my life. I grilled asparagus with basil and oil and the rain rolled down my neck. The asparagus was the color of river moss so I thought of the river and all the kid days I spent there and the water in my hair rolled down my face. Into my eyes. I wore braids then as I do now, all summer. I used the tongs that are too big for my hands and the wire brush the size of my femur. My right forearm is sore. As are my legs. Every morning I head out on the same path, late, when it's as hot as I can bear it. Two miles to the curb round the bend of the yellow line, two miles back. I run the foothills up, save my shins and walk the down. I eat soybeans from their pods every afternoon while reading in case I will not find them in the grocery stores when I get back. I read about Image. Recklessly. I am dressed now but for my shoes. It's as hot as I can bear it, which is very hot, so it is time. I am quiet. I am listening. I didn't think to tell You I was so intent on listening.

***

Intense emotion causes pattern to arise in the mind--if the mind is strong enough. Perhaps I should say, not pattern, but pattern-units, or units of design. (I do not say that intense emotion is the sole possible cause of such units. I say simply that they can result from it. They also result from other sorts of energy.) I am using this term 'pattern-unit', because I want to get away from the confusion between 'pattern' and 'applied decoration'. By applied decoration I mean something like the 'wall of Troy pattern'. The invention was merely the first curley-cue, or the first pair of them. The rest is repetition, is copying.

By pattern-unit or vorticist picture I mean the single jet. The difference between the pattern-unit and the picture is one of complexity. The pattern-unit is so simple that one can bear having it repeated several or many times. When it becomes so complex that repetion would be useless, then it is a picture, an 'arrangement of forms'.

Not only does emotion create the 'pattern-unit' and the 'arrangement of forms', it creates also the Image. The Image can be of two sorts. It can arise within the mind. It is then 'subjective'. External causes play upon the mind, perhaps; if so, they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves. Secondly, the Image can be objective. Emotion seizing up some external scene or action carries it intact to the mind; and that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original.

In either case the Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy. If it does not fulfil these specifications, it is not what I mean by an Image. It may be a sketch, a vignette, a criticism, an epigram or anything else you like. It may be impressionism, it may even be very good prose. By 'direct treatment', one means simply that having got the Image one refrains from hanging it with festoons.

from Selected Prose 1909-1965, "Affirmations: As for Imagisme," Ezra Pound

***

So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception.

from preface to "Alastor: or, The Spirit of Solitude," Percy Bysshe Shelley

***

And God said, let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creepers creeping on the earth.

And God created the man in His own image; in the image of God He created him. He created them male and female.

Genesis 1:26-7

***

. . .

"Let's imagine a poem as if it were an animal. When animals run, they have considerable flowing rhythms. Also they have bodies. An image is simply a body where psychic energy is free to move around. Psychic energy can't move well in a non-image statement." --Bly

***

. .

The pines had control of the sprinklers. They had minds of their own. We ran through the grass screaming and laughing when the spray hit our bodies and in this way we talked to the trees.

***

week six

Driving at night. In wilderness with brights on. With twin red tail lights ahead and the radio and dashboard showing my hands to me, steering, glowing lime green. There is new asphalt. There is a song, something like this one


that flickers out with the dash lights, the tail lights ahead too, the brights and the brakes, all snuffed out softly of a sudden while the engine drives into a pure drawn blank where my eyes are open but useless for seeing ahead.

***

The expression Herman gave me: "not your garden." Rather, that I took it from him as he took it: from a friend in conversation relating a conversation with a friend. "Not your garden." Well sometimes you get a looksee over the wall, a little tour. A red lettuce salad. A whole head. As when a friend in conversation relates a conversation with a friend. It was more than I wanted, this head, but everyone else was served first and more. So I wanted their plates.

***

What you do when you cut up potatoes and divvy. For planting, everyone gets an eye. But I want your eyes. "It's the same thing." No it's not. I want your eyes and my eyes. Your head and my head.

***

. . . . . . .

And three of my poems are featured at MiPoesias.

***

She walked out of her house
And looked around
At all the gardens that looked
Back at her house
(like all the faces
That quiz when you smile...)

And he was standing
At the corner
Where the road turned dark
A part of shiny wet
Like blood the rain fell
Black down on the street

And kissed his feet she fell
Her head an inch away from heaven
And her face pressed tight
And all around the night sang out
Like cockatoos

’there are a thousand things’ he said
’I’ll never say those things to you again’
And turning on his heel
He left a trace of bubbles
Bleeding in his stead

And in her head
A picture of a boy who left her
Lonely in the rain
(and all around the night sang out
Like cockatoos)

***

. . . . .

Well but where did they find it?! And how to get to the poem and preface if the thing is uncut? Dental mirror. Rhyming couplets, 172 of them, on war oppression religion government and colonial India which he wrote when he was about eighteen. Yeesh.

***

During his lifetime, because of his revolutionary politics, he had the utmost difficulty in getting anything published - Queen Mab did not sell any copies at all. During all his life, this "greatest of English lyrical poets" made precisely £40 from his writing, and most of that was from a novel he wrote while still at school. Some of his reviews give a fair indication of what the literary and political establishment thought of him at the time: "Mr Shelley ... would overthrow the constitution ... would pull down our churches and burn our bibles ... marriage he cannot endure."

The reviewers hated him because of his political opinions - just as many academics came to adore him in later years despite, or more rarely because of, his politics.

***

Arnold on Shelley--"a beautiful but ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain"-- referencing Joubert on Plato:

Plato shows us nothing; but he brings us brightness with him; he puts light into our eyes, and fills us with a clearness by which all objects afterward become illuminated. He teaches us nothing; but he prepares us, fashions us, and makes us ready to know all. Somehow or other, the habit of reading him augments in us the capacity for discerning and entertaining whatever fine truths may afterward present themselves. Like mountain air, it sharpens our organs, and gives us an appetite for wholesome food. ... Plato loses himself in the void; but one sees the play of his wings, one hears their rustle. ... It is good to breathe the air of Plato; but not to live upon him.

***

. .

How lucky am I? Eduardo and Simmons, both. Simmons made this flyer. Beautiful isn't it? As a friend said earlier, Simmons can do anything.

***

postcard: poetry reading, Casa Libre en la Solana, 228 North 4th Avenue, Tucson, Arizona

On Thursday, July 27th at 7 p.m. poets Eduardo C. Corral, Gina Franco, and Simmons B. Buntin will read from their work. A book signing and wine and cheese reception will follow. Free and open to the public.

About the authors:

Eduardo C. Corral holds degrees from Arizona State University and the Iowa WritersÂ’ Workshop. His work has recently been honored with a Discovery/The Nation award and a MacDowell Colony Residence. His poems are featured in a chapbook, The Border Triptych, published by Web Del Sol, and he serves as interview editor for Boxcar Poetry Review. Eduardo lives in Casa Grande.

Gina Franco, author of The Keepsake Storm (The University of Arizona Press), is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Chasen Poetry Prize, the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, and the 2006 Bread Loaf Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and has appeared in such journals as Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Crazyhorse. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Knox College. She lives in Galesburg, Illinois but continues to spend her summers in Arizona, where she grew up.

Simmons B. Buntin is the founding editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Tucson-Pima Arts Council grant, and the Colorado Artists Fellowship for Poetry. His first book of poetry, Riverfall, was published in May 2005 by Ireland's Salmon Publishing. Simmons lives in the community of Civano in southeast Tucson, where he was recently seen trying to tempt a coyote to eat lightly sauteed mesquite beans out of his hand.

***

I've missed talking to myself here. But even this little bit has my wrist and hand in a seizure cramp. My head too. The hurdle is I don't wait well. Healing's finding something else as good to do--and doing it in a splint--and I don't do that too well either.

***

week five

. . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . .

New York?

"That you can justify barring same-sex couples from marrying because of the unstable relationships of heterosexual couples"

***

. . . .

. . .

Daily storms and the summer cools midstream. I drove in 103 degrees with the window cracked and hot wind in my eyes 16 hours the third day. With the blue print cotton dress and two gallons of water on the seat. With ice in a bowl for my tongue and neck. The engine crepted along the hills, the needle crepted towards red, and the road made its yellow dashes towards the sun. The sun would not set the last hours, it became earlier as it became late.

***

. .

week four

A day to build a city in.

. . . . . . .

Try [a little song to sing in the pool]

The noodles are blessing you again with their bright arches.
They are raining their waters down upon you.
They are bringing their colors and flower shapes to your happiness.
They are helping themselves to the sky for your sake, they
are taking big scoops as they fly. Of it. And are brooding upon you
and mak'sting you pregnant with their great arched backs
they are thinking of you, they are heaping floods unto you
and two calves, one for you and one for everyone else.
They bring you extension. They bring you matters afloat.
You are slapping them against the bodies around you
with arms as long by a mind as long. You would've waited
until necessary to forgive me so I called you Tree.
We will. As long as. Another beginning. Good or bad.


***

... the right mix of creative pique and pleasure that is dignified in someone lucky enough to be a white, middle-class bohemian New Yorker - which by any measure is one of the most fortunate positions in the world. Maybe in the history of the world

Guess I'm out.

***