Personal Update

My blog is flagging. I notice I haven't posted since June 14. My readership is naturally sagging faster than a woman who nursed quintuplets.

What have I to report? Or what to report have I? Or to report, what have I? I have what to report? My strength has never been reporting, and it's not just the syntax. I try to do "creative nonfiction" as it's being called today. Nothing new. Just another category for Mark Twain's "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," if I remember the title properly, though "jumping" seemeth redundant.

But I can report. My lovely 20-yr.-old daughter just concluded a two weeks' visit which made for a pause in our lives, what with all the hiking, shopping, and catching up on her life and ours.

Also, the relative contentment I've experienced chemically over the last several months has given me no urgent condition to confess.

I was at the Kate Wolf Musical Festival on Sunday, mainly to see Richard Thompson--who played solo and did not disappoint--though he left the headliner, Emmylou Harris, in dire straits by playing first. People started leaving during her set, and no wonder--that breathy, whining voice playing so many slow, essentially three-chord songs made for a painful anticlimax.

Some earlier acts were good, notably "Po Girl" and "The Girlie Boys." The latter group had some amazing harmonies.

On the literary front I can't remember how many links I've given you to reviews, interviews and the like. The reviews of my book are available at my website. I've had the most success in promoting the book at actual readings. My next comes on July 5 in LA at Beyond Baroque, a premier venue, so I'm told. Then I'm reading on July 28 at Amnesia (bar) in San Francisco. In between we hope to go on a journey north to Eugene, Oregon and the Olympic Peninsula to see friends, and old friend from high school and a longstanding literary acquaintance in the Peninsula, Laird Barron, whose new collection of horror stories, The Imago Sequence, I highly recommend.

I'm still recovering from Sunday's music marathon. It seems wherever you looked someone was passing a funny cigarette. And it was hot by Mendocino Coast standards, and combined with a healthy dose of beer I found myself immobile for long periods, punctuated by my need to wander through the campsites where I ran into a number of friends from the coast. In fact, I met the coast Rabbi for the first time, the wife of a friend. The Synagogue out here is a healthy concern.

Below, as you will see, I completed a long poem on "The River of Life," which also happens to be the theme adopted for our men's retreat this year. The poem diverges from much contemporary poetry by being Parnassian, or seeking the "high seriousness" that Matthew Arnold spoke of. That is to say, the poem relies more upon knowledge already possessed by the reader rather than any quotidian revelation or experiential epiphany gained. It talks about the river of life on two levels, but that is quite straightforward and I won't belabor the poem anymore here. I put it at the end of the post because I don't know how many will have the patience to read it, although it goes fairly fast--under ten minutes out loud, the best way to read any poem (and especially this poem because it relies so much on rhythm for its advancement).

If you get a poet talking about their art, be prepared to be bored for a while.

Driving home from Laytonville at 3 AM was a trial, after the long day, and my eyes blurred and watered so bad that I feared I would cease to see. Highway 101 north of Willits has some long-ass curves you can't really see at night, even with your brights, so I felt properly lost and stayed under 55 mph in the right lane (when there was one) despite the 65 mph speed limit. Once I got to the 20 in Willits I was better off because of familiarity, despite the two-lane endlessly winding road with turns sometimes designated at 15 mph.

The velocity of modern living is nothing to sneeze at, however, for how many have tweeted me in the interim, how many new literary publications have surfaced on the Net, how much Facebook news has passed me by--also I have been rejected again by Poetry, which seems to mark each quarter-year passing of my life. On to another rejection!

What does rejection mean from the top-flight magazines? Presumably that you're not top-flight yet. I accept that, though in some individual poems, like "Boundaries" (recently named the best poem on the net for one week), I may have risen above the glass ceiling, but that's just another poem rejected by Poetry (no, wait--I didn't see that specific work in my long line of rejections, but I swear I sent it to them once).

I'm told Jack London had near 600 rejections before he really started rolling, but his literary naturalism was a relief from current fare in his time, and he went on to become the biggest celebrity author in America, in fact, after Mark Twain, truly defining that role. I read twenty of his best stories recently, and his perspective of social Darwinism is often punctuated with stories of trust and brotherhood in the face of the wild, so it's not all survivalist literature. In particular I enjoyed his South Sea tales. Most only associate London with the far north, but he spent much time in the tropics as well.

As I said in my last post, I'm also recovering from the Laker's victory. Next year looks promising again. Meantime I'm so bored I'm watching the first season of "Lost" at night, a gift from my middle daughter. I can't explain why I like the show so much, I suppose it's the characters, though they do not face survival as London's characters did, as food and shelter are provided by previous inhabitants of the mysterious island.

I've been avidly listening to a new bird call that swirls and rises and echoes itself at the end; we think it's a Swainson's Thrush, as thrushes are the most elegant singing birds in this neck of the woods, indeed of North America. Robert Frost has a lovely poem on one, "The Oven Bird," as does Hardy in "The Darkling Thrush." These birds can actually manufacture two tones at once and harmonize with themselves, something humpback whales cannot do for all their length of song.

I feel a little stymied at present; my long poem was roundly trashed at a poetry workshop site; I need a boost of creativity or insight or something to get my muse back at the table. Perhaps I have insulted her by going my way too much in the poem below. The reader must judge, if indeed any reader braves the poem.

"It's OK to be content," my wife assures me, but what I'm experiencing is sort of a boredom with contentment. I need a new challenge. I will be teaching a health course at the local community college if things work out, but this may depend upon certain uncertainties with my insurance company that pays the bill for my disability. I don't know if they'll even let me earn a small income through any constructive means--"totally disabled" means no work of any kind, and by putting limits on what such a person can do, the insurance company makes it an all or nothing proposition; I mean, if I do the slightest menial work for wages I might be disqualified from my benefits. I'm gathering the courage to write them, my main obstacle before confirming my teaching gig, which I would very much like to perform.

The teaching gig raises that terrible question--will they google me? And if so, will they find the record of my struggle with manic-depression? No doubt, but I hope all the publications listed first will discourage them from further seeking.

Once you've gone public there's not much privacy to protect. As I try to live my life transparently, this is no problem, but it could present a problem to future employers. My response to that would be to block my blog, where most of my confessional agonies have been posted.

Think: When I began this blog on July 27, 2005, I was embroiled in legal complications in Mexico regarding the return of our dog and other possessions that were being ransomed by our former maid. Overall, Mexico was a disaster for us, emotionally, physically and financially. It was truly the land of dreams, though in our case, failed dreams. If you want to get blotto and hang around with wanna-be artists and expats, San Miguel is the place for you. You can even build a lovely house and get divorced afterwards, as some of our friends did. Affairs abounded. All rules were off. Kathleen and I survived with our love intact but not much else. And by this I do not mean to imply that any unfaithfulness occurred on our part, it didn't; it's just that so many free spirits were pursuing adolescent dreams in their 50s there.

So Michael Jackson's dead. For me it's sort of like Bob Hope: "You mean he was still alive?" I kept waiting for Bob Hope to die until I convinced myself he had done it quietly. Then I found out the man presumed dead finally died. So it goes. Can't keep up with all the icons, past and present. In fact, the second page of our paper from Santa Rosa is often filled with celebrities whom I don't know or know of. And who are the real celebrities? Did I need to know that one member of the band, "Men at Work," was having as birthday? That's stretching celebrity to a fine thinness of irrelevance.

So much for today's bloviations. Here's the poem (I removed it because I thought it of poor quality, apologies).


Kiloneutral,

CE

Short Take on the Lakers' Victory

The Lakers have won it all and my anxiety is slaked. How nervous and pessimistic I become as I watch! Even a 16 point lead in the 4th quarter wasn't enough for me. I could only think of how we might blow it, and victory was more a relief for me than a celebration. Call me a nervous fan.

I lived through last year's sixth game blowout just as the Lakers did, and we came to the same conclusion: toughen up. And toughen up we did. We played hard in the post, making Dwight Howard ineffective. Just as importantly, we shot better tonight than they did from three point range. Ariza was wonderful, as were Kobe, Lamar and Fisher. We had the grit. We had the determination. And it feels almost as if Kobe willed us this championship. He was hungry, he let everyone know it, especially his teammates. And they took their cue from him.

Who's better, Kobe or LeBron? I'd have to say LeBron. But Kobe has a superior "supporting cast," it's clear. There's talk of Shaq going to Cleveland, but they need youth--what with robotic Ilgauskus and washed-up Ben Wallace and can't- shoot Varajao. All LeBron has is Mo Williams and change. He needs a real post player like Garnett or Gasol to excel in team basketball. And may I say, regarding Garnett, that if he and Leon Powe were healthy (for the Celtics) they would have represented the East, and the series would have likely gone seven. Because of injuries the two best teams did not meet in the finals.

Good to see Kobe with his first MVP award as well, and for Phil to get that number ten over Red Auerbach, longtime nemesis of the Lakers.

"So what will we do now?" my wife and I exclaim. Basketball takes up a big portion of our psychic life in its season, and now perhaps we'll be freed to work in the garden and socialize a little more. Like I said, it's a relief.

At Kiloneutral,

CE

Garden Tours; Osprey Poem

Today I led two tours at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, the first with Kindergartners and the second with seniors. It became obvious to me that the kids needed to stay in motion; to stop and lecture about heritage roses only frustrated them, but to watch them smell and touch the roses was a trip.

Seniors tend to wander away on their own to whatever interested them, a natural outcome of the freedom and economy shortened time imparts. By the end of the tour I had only three seniors left; all the others had detoured.

Quite a contrast, the energy of the very young and the wanderings of the old. To know what you want in your remaining time is a good trait, it saves wastage, but to be a five-year-old is to want everything, to experience everything. In a healthy kid with a good family the world can be Disneyland. Because of that impression, when I went grocery shopping afterwards, I tried to enjoy each choice of goods and interaction with others in the same way, and it worked well. I was in no hurry, simply open to new experiences with no timetable or agenda. Of course, one of the stops was at the pharmacy where I picked up my antipsychotic medicine, Abilify, which allows me to experience "normality." Gotta love the name of that drug. Makes me think of others:

Blowitoffazol

Idontcarazine.

Antimelancholycodone.

Rejoicatol.

Getoffmycaserpine.

Wouldn't it be fun to work in the name department for new drugs? Whoever invented the palindrome Xanax was a genius.

Words and diseases should sound like themselves, why I don't like the word, "pulchritude," meaning beautifully voluptuous. Sounds more like a mortal sin. "The hubris of his pulchritude betrayed him."

Tuberculosis sounds like a slimy disease; syphilis sounds nasty; pancreatitis is as painful as it sounds. Pustules, boils, fractures, hematomas, you gotta love it. But there are exceptions--like "fifth disease," a common and harmless virus in children.
As a poet I like words that sound like what they are.

*********************************************************************************

I may be teaching a health course at the local community college this fall. Gotta be sure to invite some local healers--Mendocino is full of them--to be in tune with the culture around me: herbalists, naturopaths, yoga teachers, and all sorts of specialized services for the spiritually aware--not to imply that these are better methods to health--only that 90% of illnesses are "self-limiting," so it doesn't matter whom you go to to feel better in most cases. But as I always say, if you're in real pain you'll go to a real doctor. Crystals won't make a bad appendix ascend out of the abdomen. (Unless you have double-blind studies to prove it.)

I tried to write a poem yesterday about two ospreys but according to my wife and editor it didn't turn out so well. BTW, the new Blue Fifth Review is out, edited by Sam Rasnake. I recommend it even though I have no work in there!

Here's the poem my editor didn't like (it's no great shakes, just what I saw yesterday):


At Frolic Cove

In the osprey's spiculed talons
a green fish wriggled headfirst,
righted like a torpedo
so that its tail resembled
a flapping rudder
beneath the tail fan.

The waterfall was low.
I cupped my hand and drank.
The creek disappeared in sand.

Circling back, with crooked wings
she signaled to her mate
a return to the massive nest.
Four times she flew around
until the fish grew limp
and merely hung.
North he flew reluctantly,
a fisherman embarrassed.


Frolic Cove is the site where a ship foundered and broke back in 1857, full of silk and china. Pieces of the cargo were discovered in Pomo Indian settlements up to 20 miles away. All the seamen escaped as the captain managed to beach the boat after breaking on the reef. Sometimes Kathleen thinks she has found there remnants of broken china bits polished by the sea. I'm sure the poem would be better if I included the crash. But "It is what it is." I'm fond of that newspeak tautology, I admit. And the experience was what it was, though likely not enough for a poem--yet.


All for today,

At 1 Kilobunny,

CE

Update on Publications and Reading Venues; New Poem

I wanted to alert you to some new publications and readings.

Here's an essay in Barefoot Muse on "Intellectual Substance in Poetry":

There is a companion essay in Umbrella:

I think I already told you about my memoir "On Becoming a Poet" in PIF:

New poems in The Avatar Review:

And my upcoming readings:

First, "Poetry and Pizza" at 333 Montgomery at Bush in SF on June 5 at 8 PM, hope some of you can come.

I'll be at Beyond Baroque on July 5 at 5 PM, 681 Venice blvd, Venice, CA for any in the LA area.

More to come...

And thanks to all who have purchased my book--like the reviews, I've heard nothing but good reports!

As for my previous blog, hashing it out on paper has helped me make peace with ambition again. It's about the poem. Publishing and recognition are secondary, but I for one need the encouragement to go on. So I do.

June gloom has hit Mendocino and Kathleen hates it. The overcast days don't affect my mood one way or the other. Then I'm Nordic by descent.

There were some great comments on my last post if you haven't read them. Thanks Mittens and Beau Blue!

Since I find myself with little else to say, here's a new poem I may have posted in rough draft form before but I doubt it. Ah memory, where hast thou gone?


Of Book Trees

First, do not pick a green book,
the print is faint
and there's often no ending.
They also fail to develop the proper musk,
that smell of paper and glue.

Paperbacks mature more quickly
but are usually known cultivars
and lack the vigor of hybrids
that hardbacks display.
Still, where the soil is poor
or shade diminishes
the literary vigor of the tree,
occasionally a masterpiece
may appear. These are usually
grafted onto hardback stock
as soon as possible.

Pulp paperback trees
have no peer and can produce
more fruit than any other
though as in a Chinese meal
you may be hungry afterwards.

The rules for nonfiction trees are simple:
lots of room and lots of light.
Space them too close together
and they share the same opinion;
give them too much shade
and the research isn't up to par.

Reference trees are orderly as beech forests,
their tall smooth boles spaced widely,
an air of gravity in the light
that floods the oblong leaves.
Silence and history walk there.

Beware a brown book,
usually overwritten or overripe,
with stultifying reams of overexplanation
and overelaboration as in how many paradoxes
can fit on the head of a heading.
But you might find Henry James there
or the critical prose of Eliot,
so a discriminating taste
in aged books should be cultivated;
not all their fruit is dry.

A red book should be picked immediately.
Bright red has the genius of youth
though Shakespeare and Dante
come in gold and are common now,
having been cultivated for centuries.
The Bible is black but remember,
licorice tea is sweet
like the scroll Jeremiah ate.

Poetry trees are rare
and do best in the high desert.
Overwatering them
leads to self-indulgence
while soil too rich yields verse
in love with its own diction.
Planted in unforgiving soil
they have a chance,
though most die young.


At 1 Kilobunny,

CE

The Battle for Poetic Recognition

I recently bought a new "Poet's Market," an intimidating book printed on cheap paper of 572 pp. In it is an interview with a "successful" poet, who does 75 seminars and readings a year, up to 150 if he has a new book or album out. He edits a literary magazine and is also a songwriter.

He estimates that 1400 Americans may make some living through poetry, which sounds like a lot to me. Obviously this man works hard. Yet in researching him on the net he had only 5% of the references I do on Google. Apparently he has not published extensively online. Then I checked his latest book from 2007. It ranks below 1,600,000 titles on Amazon. My new book ranks just above 900,000, for comparison, rendering them likely equally obscure. I also did not recognize his name from the article.

T. S. Eliot wrote "There is no competition." Unfortunately, in this day and age of proliferating poets, Eliot is wrong. There is competition. Each poem published in a journal that rejects me is a potential place where I might have had success. Each reading booked up in advance in a major city is one reading I can't get.

Although K.F. admits that the poetry world has proliferated beyond his imaginings, from open mikes to slams, the Internet, etc., he has this to say about the art:

"What has not changed is the nepotism of the Biz and the preconceived notions of the academic sector. Most poets still teach to support themselves. There is still no one who rushes home to tell his parents that he is a poet and then is subsequently swamped with congratulations and financial support."

We all know this. Poets are not pariahs, just largely irrelevant to the larger culture. I have compared poetry to lawn bowling in this regard in past essays, "a cultural vestigial organ." Yet if one is truly infected by poetry there is no cure. I will go on writing and publishing until they take this computer from my cold dead hands. Yes, I want to be read. Yes, I would like more recognition. Yes, I have a new book to promote and eight interviews and eight reviews already. But I assure you my book is not jumping off the shelves. The most I've sold at once is five at a local reading. (I also importuned my bank manager, dentist and my shrink and family doctor to buy copies; after all, the monetary exchange for their services dwarfs a small purchase of my book.)

I did recently receive encouragement from Ireland, where a J. Patterson wrote me for my revised version of the essay on T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." No one to my knowledge ever finished that essay before; I even had a standing reward of $25 for the first person who did. Afterwards this good soul ordered a signed copy of "Unexpected Light" and gave me a good report. I enjoyed the correspondence. I enjoyed the fact that he felt my treatment of Eliot was substantial and witty and fun to read. I also know, from my research, that certain Christian aspects of the poems were better elucidated in my essay than any others I could find.

In fact, everyone has given me a good report; the reviews have been uniformly positive. So where do I go from here? More reviews, more interviews, more publications? If this fellow is relatively famous and interviewed for "Poet's Market" and his book ranks far below mine (though at these numbers one or two purchases can shoot you back up the ignominious ladder of obscurity), and he has 5% of my references on Google, what should I say? That I'm better known on the Net? I suspect he makes most of his dough leading seminars, that's where the real money is for mid-level poets, while the truly famous can command $10,000 or more for a single performance--you know, Collins, Angelou and the rest.

The scale of celebrity among poets is more variable than the winners of "American Idol." Luck has much to do with it, but so does nepotism. An MFA with a close connection to a well-known poet/professor has a much better chance at ascending the ladder than a disabled doctor with few connections. That goes without saying, especially since this doctor only became serious about publishing in 1997. Yet since then I've published two books of poetry and edited one anthology while being included in many others. I even recently had "Boundaries" recognized as the best poem currently online for a week: http://bestnewpoemsonline.wordpress.com/ (see May 18).

I have some obstacles to furthering my ambition, of course. First, I live far away from metropolitan centers where venues abound. Second, I'm manic-depressive and travel can really screw with my mood. Third, I loathe to be away from my true love, Kathleen. But paramount, above all these, is the program in my head forbidding self-promotion. My mother instilled in me very early not to blow my own horn, not to brag, to rather wait for my excellence to be recognized. That's the Emily Dickinson way that many poets cling to: "I'll be noticed when I'm dead." Fat chance if you weren't noticed while alive.

To be noticed while alive can be arranged, however. For the well-heeled poet of unlimited means, an expensive New York publicist can be hired and she will get readings and reviews in that great hive considered the center of literature in these United States. Still, if the quality lacks, such a poet would be rejected by the academic community, and rightly so, but that will not stop them from out-googling, out-selling and out-maneuvering others of greater talent. I see many poets self-publishing, even in their own magazines, and acting as if they have received recognition when they have essentially granted it to themselves.

I hate cold calling people I've never met to ask for open reading dates on the Pacific Coast. I'm not looking forward to the travel in my four dates coming up (SF, Sacramento, LA, SD) require, and only two of them look like first class venues. But I will keep my word and show up, I hope, unless my energy fails.

But look at the downside again. K.F. does up to a 150 readings a year when a new book comes out and his Amazon ranking is below mine. And there's also a strange feather in my hat; my first book, "Elementary," is apparently rare enough now (only 300 copies were printed) that it sells for $189 on Amazon, and only one copy is available. So someone thinks my first book is valuable. What does that mean? I don't know. Probably something to do with book collectors who hoard obscure poets.

This all boils down to one question for me: Is it worth the work? If I knock my head against the world of poetry venues, will it result in anything of note--sales, publicity, what? Some result, yes, a few books sold here and there, not enough to cover my gas, but in the main, it's doubtful. It is probably wiser to concentrate on breaking into the august publications like Southern Review and Poetry. So far I haven't broken that glass ceiling, though to be fair, at my best, I do not think myself the inferior to those I see in there, though I often admire the work. And one wonders (despite the "blind reading" claims of so many of these journals) what would happen if my name were John Ashbery or W. S. Merwin or Mark Strand. Wouldn't these instantly be kicked upstairs by the powers that be? I do not believe the editors are fair in this regard, whatever they claim. Nepotism by reputation and previous publication within a magazine still obtain.

If I were a purist it would be all about the work, the next poem, the next song, trying to achieve that artistic perfection or Logos that all artists aspire to.

But I'm human, ah there's the rub. Like any artist I crave recognition, yet my Lutheran background tells me that ambition may be wrong, just as self-promotion is wrong. But that can't be right. Even Jesus promoted himself by miracles and street preaching. So perhaps it's the Protestant inheritance that drives me; I can't have work without result! I can't just write poetry for nothing for magazines that don't pay and come with little recognition. Or can I?

Further, Jesus promoted himself for the benefit of mankind; to what degree can I say my art does something of the same? I know my manic-depressive and love poems have helped some, but on a scale of good works--which the New Testament rejects wholesale--I can't compare to a missionary distributing food and medicines--or is my calling just different and just as important in its way? So my wife would have me think.

I have been undiscriminating about my best work, sending it to whatever e-zine suited my fancy at the time, or because of a submission call. I could have parceled my work out slowly, attacking only the best magazines. But initially I didn't have the self-confidence to do so, and the thrill of being published anywhere superseded the thrill of submitting to Poetry for ten years in hope against hope. (BTW, I do send them regular submissions, they may even recognize my name from the amount of rejections I endure.)

So what am I saying? Craig is confused. Plain confused. He loves poetry, he likes to publish, he loves giving readings, but he wonders 1) Does he have the necessary drive to promote himself like K.F.? And 2), Is it worth it?

In discussing this with my wife and editor this morning, she suggested that the best scenario is to be taken under a well-known poet's wing and mentored along. At 54 I feel I am in the mentor stage; I teach poetry online (see my website for the course offering) and every unpublished poet who has taken my course has been afterwards published, save one who didn't want to submit and likely wasn't ready.

I'm a little old for applying for fellowships at major universities for poets, and the stipend wouldn't cover expenses anyway. I don't want to uproot myself from my beloved Mendocino and go traipsing to the Iowa Writer's Workshop for instruction and connections. In truth I've only really been at this for twelve years, so perhaps, since I first published at roughly 17, I should think of myself as only 29 in the "serious poetry competition." So I would still likely benefit from a mentor. How do you get one? I suppose the way you do everything else: by endless queries.

"Cast your bread upon the waters and it shall return to you after many days."

But sometimes you only feed the ducks.


In a mixed state, between 2 Kilorats and 1 Kilobunny,

CE

Chinese Brush Experiment Blog

I wrote the below without revision; it is what spilled out. I call this the "Chinese Brush Experiment," since the same is true of Chinese calligraphy and most painting, Japanese as well.


I haven't blogged in so long it seems a ring in a tree, a rose bare-limbed then blossoming, you know, the way a boat rocks in the water under the harbor lights, powered by pillows and gravity. And the gatekeeper always lurks with his skleteton keys to remind us of our anti-gravity, the digital blink of death, cancelling, cancelling, but you must believe! You must fight, fight, fight!

The warrior solves some things, the magician more. Better to twist your perspective into the guise of the gnarled than force the limbs to bend toward you.

Goldfish: the sacrifice of children.

Uninhibited writing is a phantasm. How can you write without editing? We edit as we write and good writers edit afterwards. Edit too much and you squeeze the juice out of a thing.

I love Sinatra. 50s are best.

How a wax myrtle tree became an anaconda in resisting sedge and a bog.

A bog does have a slow inlet and outlet, though no obvious streams. I saw a carniverous plant in Sholars Bog, the sundew. Sticky, sticky, sticky. Don't want to be no mosquito flittin there, no.

I'm too tired to put up my latest links.

Gotta get serious about book promotion, pull out all the stops, crash the dam, splinter the fort, suck the last drop of water from a rock, all the usual applications of perseverance.

All this stuff about Ruth Padel. I've met her and published her; I like her a great deal. I think she did indeed make an error in judgment, but a Freudian error. She didn't really want the post. She did not think she merited it unconsciously. Psychoanalysis can still be helpful at times.

1 Kilobunny,

CE

New Poem; Akisthesia; Lakers

The Lakers won the first playoff game of the Western Conference Finals. They did it by grit and luck. Denver is a great team and this should be a great series. In the end, Kobe just wouldn't let the Lakers lose, and Trevor Ariza made a steal that sealed the game. I know this is not a basketball blog, but being a Lakers fan for 50years has me programmed.

As to my mood, several chemical alterations have happened. First I quit smoking. Then I withdrew from high dose morphine. My Effexor was doubled. Now I feel tired most of the time, need naps in the afternoon. I wonder if it is the increased Effexor or symptoms of withdrawal. One thing I can say is that I've felt that activated, uncomfortable "ants in the pants" feeling--clinically termed akisthesia--which often precedes a flip in mood. We shall see.

I feel so blase'. I have trouble putting my carcass in gear to do anything. I lack ambition. I haven't been playing the guitar. I'm in a sort of anhedonic desert where my crying spells have at least stopped. We don't want a repeat of the two-year depression of 2006-2008, do we? God forbid by his mercy.

Meanwhile I won a coup by having a poem published in Mannequin Envy, "Boundaries," named as the best poem online. It came as a complete surprise to me. I don't know who started the selections, but considering all the poems online that is some kind of an honor. Here's the link: Best Poems Online It appears to be an outfit out of New Zealand, since the link to my book where the poem occurs puts the price of my paperback version over twice what it is in American dollars. I hope some mad sheep farmer who loves poetry buys a copy.

I haven't much more to say. I don't know if this qualifies as a blog. Close to being a Twitter, I fear.

But I'll end it with a new poem:


The Wind

comes from everywhere
and makes the Bishop pines lean
the eucalypti sift and sift
as the west wind caroms north
and south and east in a forested cup
on the headlands of Pt. Cabrillo.

The wind scours the sky
and scrubs the stars so clear
it hurts my neck to look up.
“Like the sound of many waters”
the wind holds a million secrets.

Still to listen to the wind is dangerous
for it tells us nothing in a way
that seems a something--questions
wrapped in hush-swaddled answers
that lead to bigger questions.

If you do listen to the wind
try to shape a shape within it,
something to talk to, something
familiar with the unseen currents
that keep us talking to each other.


At 2 Kilorats,

CE

First Video, New Interview, Withdrawal

I was castigated by one Sissy T for not continuing this blog, even though her comment was below a post from 2008. Can't please all people in all times, as "Lost" and "Star Trek" (both of which I highly recommend) have taught us.

J. J. Abrams, producer of both, seems to have solved that old conundrum: You can meet yourself in the past because you're adult self is on a different timeline. Forget the math; it adds to the drama.

BTW, I bought a cheap webcam and here's my first recording:


Moodwise I've been sketchy. I've had a lot of weeping spells at my usual witching hour, 11 AM, though only once in the last three days. And with that emotion comes the cacophonous recitations of demons: "You're no good. You're worthless. Why exist? You're a burden." And blah, blah, blah.

Among the mood-disordered, this is the chicken and egg question. For severe mood disorders like mine, the affect or emotion always precedes the negative thoughts. Thus to improve my thoughts I must improve my mood, not the other way around. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is more helpful is lesser cases, I think.

IN OTHER WORDS POSITIVE THINKING HAS NEVER HELPED ME OUT OF A DEPRESSION AND NEVER WILL; I CAN'T HAVE POSITIVE THINKING WITH AN OVERWHELMINGLY BAD MOOD.

(I think that that's the first time I've used capitals on this blog.)

Although I will not admit being more than three kilorats down, to give you an idea of where my head has been, here's a dark poem from a dark mind.


Dark Christ

I

I kissed the thin lips
of the black Jesus of depression
ignominiously tacked
to a rough-hewn cross.
His eyes stared blankly,
black marbles in white.
His loincloth had a gold band
to match his yellow hair.
On his black wrists
blood was barely visible.

I wanted to fall at his feet
but his eyes were fixed
at some insensible point
beyond any horizon,
some future judgment perhaps
of the cockroach called man.
I knelt and pawed at his ankles
in hopeless supplication.
Blood dried on my hands
but he never looked down.

Larger than death he hung
never accusing me
but staring, staring
at a point beyond any point,
his face lost to man.
How could my salvation be so eclipsed?
What did I owe him?
He owed me nothing.
All was dark save his hair.
And why blond?
An attempt at a halo?

II

In those three hours
he agonized, separated
from every good ever authored
by the smallest angel
sent by the Father,
bereft, without heft
or substance,
an entire negation
of carbon-based life
staring, staring
at a point beyond points--
there was no room for man
so I threw my salvation down
like a piece of bloody obsidian
and like the disciples
had no faith in the resurrection,
the ultimate betrayal.


See? It's not the kind of art you want to hang on a hotel wall, much less your refrigerator. But I think it's powerful, and it's rare I'm fairly happy with a near first draft.

As a docent I lead lots of tours through the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, which I highly recommend. I'm most gratified when I get elementary school children and I can show them how a flower is both a girl and a boy.

Talk about narcissism! Self-pollinators, obviously not Catholic.

I have now successfully withdrawn from m.s. contin, a long-acting form of morphine I've taken for my neck and back. I have sneezing, loose stools and a great tiredness, but I know it will pass. I do feel a little clearer, which was my goal. And I've rarely smoked since April 1, so withdrawal from narcotics and nicotine, quoth my shrink, might have something to do with my recent dip? Or was it the unconscious memory of my two-year depression that began on April 1, 2006? I've had less than a year of normal mood since. But I am so grateful for it, when pancakes taste good and the blue jays shine and flowers explode like popcorn, yes this incredibly variegated world in which we live, the small blue flower by the roadside whose name you'll never know.

Before closing I'd like to share a new link to an interview with me in MyDepressionConnection.

Unlike the romantic blog interviews, this one focuses on the manic-depressive aspect of my work.


Thine in Truth and Art,

2 Kilorats,

C. E. Chaffin

Inevitable Net Progression; New Poem

I fear my blogability (borrowing a neologism from Bud commercials) has been declining. Here is the progression of net communication as I see it:

1) e-mail
2) posting boards
3) listserv, newsgroups
4) blogs
5) My Space and Facebook
6) Twitter
7) Video twitter (a prediction)

There are still intimate places on the web, small poetry boards and boards of special concern, and none of these "advances" precludes the use of a previous one.

I like e-mail best because I hate handling paper. I've been on boards, still attend one. I've been on listservs, none now. My blog is self-explanatory. I joined My Space and facebook but only pursued facebook where I now have over 500 (mainly literary) "friends." (The existence of such platforms naturally cheapens the word, "friend.") My publisher encouraged me to twitter and now I have a tweet deck. The time will come when short videos can be posted through twitter; links to videos are already possible. Then we'll have canned film snippets from personalities falling through the rafters.

What does this progression say about the Net? First, that things go from private to public quickly. Second, that associations expand exponentially if you keep playing. And third, the greater the audience, the less data shared, which results in the trivializing of life to buzz words and sound bites and branding. Don't we brand cattle?

It's a dehumanizing process that began with the telegraph. Nevertheless we can overcome it and preserve intimacy within it, for which e-mails and small boards thankfully remain.

As obtains in poetry today, where we have too many poets and not enough readers, on the web we have too many platforms and not enough players (think of the demise of Ringo). We have more people inventing platforms than people that can use them.

Speaking of poetry, here's a new poem, one of the thirty I wrote in April for National Poetry Month:


Flowers of Heraclitus

I watch the garden too much.
hoping for it to happen.
The deer could undo it all.
Last year they savaged the cabbage,
cropped the snapdragons
and beheaded the broccoli.
This year I planted only flowers
mainly of the daisy family,
deer and drought-resistant.

I watch the garden too much.
Heraclitus explained we only notice change.
As too much part of what is changing
the observer becomes oblivious.
If only I could return in two weeks
to see the changes, but who would watch
over the garden meanwhile?

I watch the garden too much.
In the late afternoon the sun
curls around the cypress,
lighting the plants a second time.
Copper daisy, heliotrope, princess flower--
their time will come, while all time
belongs to weeds, the wild radish,
nettles, mint and wild cucumber.
And in all these no real tropes
except the hands of a gardener,
the dirt beneath the nails
I poke at with a toothbrush.


I have several new interviews out at romantic blogs, emphasizing the love poems in my book. Here's one:

Kristina Knight

I also fired my web publicist for the book, as he had only pursued general web promotion and never gotten me a single reading or sold a single book. In marketing nowadays you start with the personality and then try to sell the product--at least in the arts. I want the book to speak for itself, why readings are so salutary. I have readings coming up in SF and LA and SD in June and July. If anyone reading this blog has knowledge of more west coast venues, please send them my way.

While reading my poetry to an audience I feel a wholeness, as if this was what I was meant to do. How good is that?


Bouncing between 3 Kilorats and Kiloneutral,

NBA Predictions, Poem, New Review

The last NBA playoff team to advance has been determined: The Atlanta Hawks. Cleveland should beat them four games to one.

The second round begins today with Dallas vs. Denver. This is a hard one to call, but based on superior inside strength I think Denver should be favored to move on and meet the Lakers, who should beat Houston in six.

In the East, contrary to most expectations, I think Boston will handle Orlando in six or seven and go on to be beaten by Cleveland in a tough series. Despite the loss of Kevin Garnett, they are still the champions, and under pressure they play like it.

It's a gray day here on the Mendocino coast, post-rain. It's great that we got our garden in during a sunny spell and that now it is getting a thorough watering from nature. I can't wait for our flowers to mature; many have started blooming. It gives me joy to stare out to the oceean over the colors of our garden.

I actually beat my wife and editor tonight at Scrabble. That was a feat I can get fat on. Oh, and she called me "fat" today. Like I didn't know it. I immediately comforted myself with extreme nachos. Actually I ate a salad.

Salads aren't bad if you put enough croutons and nuts on them to get some real calories up the pipe.

Yes, I need a diet.

No, I'm not smoking.

But do I have a poem?

Poems divide my readership to a certain extent; the literary folks read them while the mood-disordered folks sort of gloss over them, with the natural exception of mood-disordered literary types.

Oh, there's a new review out on my book at The Pedestal, a fine venue with an insightful reviewer who really gets the dark side of "Unexpected Light."

Here's a recent poem;


The Stranger

This morning I wept for no reason.
I've been pushing back the terror
like a stage curtain, one arm
holding back the darkness,
all that muffled noise of sets being moved,
sets for my future
when I don't want the present changed.
I wonder if my understudy
will look like me, act like me, suffer like me.
Of course not, he has his own life.
But isn't it my life, too?

Computers have a trash bin
for every stump of a poem we tried to save
although our grafts would never take.
But just to keep on writing, holding
the curtain at arm's length, is this not a life
terrorized? Shouldn't I welcome the stranger,
who comes robed in the future,
equally prepared for sadness or joy?

Perhaps at every moment of awakening
we generate a ghost, a dark companion
to drag the hero down to where
the dragon sits, whom we must overcome
by being still; to fight
would only seed another monster.
The one in the mirror is quite enough.


All for tonight.


At 1 Kilobunny,

CE

Contest Winners!

I am proud to announce the winners of the "Unexpected Light" contest: James Wilk with "Anorexic" (previously published in the medical journal, Chest) and Edmund Conti with "My Son the Critic."

The two poems could hardly be more different in style. Wilk's careful, clinical dissection of a horrifying disease and the speaker/doctor's own attitude towards it is exquisite, although some of the medical diction may be a little hard to take for those spared the immersion in medicine doctors must undergo. Conti's plaintive, playful, sleight-of-hand in impressing his son with poetry, written in witty rhymes with the relationship as a backdrop, could be classified as "light verse" if such a distinction were necessary. I'm mailing the hardback copies to each of them today.

All of the entries were good. It was a difficult choice. I must put forth one honorable mention, "The Mission," by Fred Longworth, that made the judging especially difficult. It appears as the third poem, below.

Kudos to all for your participation. I should mention there are two new interviews up about my book on my new "blog tour." The first is at Tara S. Nichols' Blog (adults only). The second is at Sheri Whitefeather's Blog.

Without further ado, here are the winners!


Anorexic


From the outside, I see no heretic,
no witch, no bitch now burning at the stake.
I see a fertile field stricken by drought.
My fingers scamper down the crevices
of her neck, spider-like, across the gullies
between the muscles, formed as fat receded
in some sick parody of glaciation,
leaving behind the lumpy soil of lymph
nodes, salivary glands, windpipe and thyroid
traversed by pipes for irrigation—veins
and arteries—yet still this land is barren
but for lanugo, powerless to stop
erosion by the wind, the breath, the ruach.

I palm the stethoscope’s unfeeling head.
My fingers trace the furrows of her spine,
parting the fine lanugo hairs that bristle
like wind-blown grass effacing the once deep
ruts of a packed dirt trail across Nebraska.
Her ribs are furrows, breasts prairie dog mounds.

I auscultate, the stethoscope a snake,
slithering, pausing, listening below.
Without the muffling fat, everything’s loud:
the trochaic machinations of the heart,
the slow iambic rhythms of the lungs,
the free verse borborygmi of the bowels.

The pager breaks my trance. I leave to write
a note of the encounter, order labs
and artificial nourishment by vein.
I sigh, reminded of the psalmist’s words:
Their soul abhorreth all manner of food;
and they draw near unto the gates of death.

I hurry to keep my dinner reservation
but pause outside her door to glimpse the girl,
a fallow field half-naked on the bed.
Fluorescent lights, unmoving in their coffins
in the ceiling, whisper light across the dust
bowl of her belly, casting angular
and ominous shadows of trochanters
and tubercles from the bones she’ll leave behind.


--James Wilk



MY SON THE CRITIC

Read me a bedtime poem, said my son.
So I read him this:

We say hippopotami
But not rhinoceri
A strange dichotomy
In nature's glossary.

But we do say rhinoceri, he said. Look it up.
So I read him this:

Life is unfair
For most of us, therefore
Let's have a fanfare
For those that it's fair for.

I smell a slant rhyme, he said, sniffing.
So I read him this:

While trying to grapple
With gravity, Newton
Was helped by an apple
He didn't compute on.

My teacher says that's not poetry, he said.
So I read him this:

René Descartes, he thought
And therefore knew he was.
And since he was, he sought
To make us think. He does.

That made me think, he said. But not feel.
So I read him this:

My hair has a wonderful sheen.
My toenails, clipped, have regality.
It's just all those things in between
That give me a sense of mortality.

Did the earth move? I asked. Anything?
Nothing moved. He was asleep.

--Edmund Conti




The Mission

God climbs down from the rafters of your mind
and sits across the breakfast table,
mooching buckwheat pancakes and maple syrup
and telling you the world has gone all wrong.

You're the one He's picked to set it right,
but if you fail at the task —
at this point He looks you hard in the eye —
He'll make you the wick to a perpetual candle.
After all, you are His child and He loves you.

What's wrong with the world — God continues —
is infidels, at last count three billion and growing.
He commands you to kill them all by five p.m.

Your clear away the dishes and the food,
lay Kalashnikov and hand grenades upon the table.
You gaze out the window at the busy, suburban avenue.
You think it over.

Times like this, you envy Abraham.
To please his God, he only had to kill a son.


--Fred Longworth



Thine in Truth and Art,

(moodwise ranging between 2 kilorats and 2 kilobunnies--slightly mixed state)

CE

Tweeting and Dishwater Hands

I feel I am being stretched too thin by my blog, my Red Room blog, my Wisefire page, Facebook, Twitter and the ongoing promotion of my book. I feel stretched out into the ether and take my therapy in gardening and nature walks.

Except for my blog, I've been hornswaggled into these other platforms by people, like my publisher, who insisted they were invaluable in ongoing publicity on the web. I've even been tweeting a poem or two on Twitter line by line. Who reads it I don't know. I do know I have very little time to read all the stuff that comes my way and still have a life in the real world. Net overload? But what else would I do with my time? Plenty, I suppose. Yet this carnival of digital souls is a wonder and presages a new world, an even smaller world, where if you want, I suppose, you can know the kind of underwear Britney has chosen immediately afterwards.

I confess that when I read our local paper, The Press Democrat of Sonoma, I often glance first at the celebrity page on the inside of the front cover. Many of the celebrities I've never heard of, which bespeaks my age, but news about others comfort me like weather reports. And then there's always the downfall of the mighty which we all secretly wish.

The question is, how much does this exhalation into the ether affect your personality? No doubt it leads to a form of cybernarcissism, where our thoughts and deeds are magnified by the easy utility of web platforms. Obama used this with great aplomb, but he had 100 monkeys typing to do it, or more.

The age of the sound bite has now produced tweeting, the new path to notoriety. Who will be the champion tweeter? Who cares? Can you imagine "Blogging with the Stars?" Or "Tweeting with the Rolling Stones? Smart, current marketing people urge a web presence, and I had an article written about me ten years ago entitled, "A Presence on the Net."

Has my presence increased? Actually, since stopping The Melic Review in 2006, my presence has decreased, as I am no longer an editor at large whom writers aim to please. Now I am just like any other poet submitting to journals, with no special powers. Ending Melic when I did seemed right, but I wish I had the team to resurrect it. It's all about finding a literary webmaster, no small ticket.

To be fair, I did transition to blogging, though a little late, yet my highest average readership has been around 60. If I don't post frequently it naturally drops.

Friday I'll announce the winners of the poetry contest. If there are any laggers who still want to submit, send your best poem to cechaffin at gmail dot com. The winners will receive a signed hardback copy of "Unexpected Light," a book you simply must have if you've been a reader of this blog. It has many poems where I deal with the demon of depression that I blogged about here two years running.

My wife gave me a great gift the other day: If I would wash the dishes nightly, she would take over the finances. I can't tell you how grateful I am to have that burden off of my back. I have been awful at it, as I'm sure my credit score would reflect, but you can't be good at everything. In fact, I have a neurosis about money. It always seemed to make my family of origin unhappy.

God has always provided for me and my family and I thank him for it. Given my level of poor budgeting and living hand-to-mouth, it surely is a miracle to have such a burden lifted for the first time in my adult life. A helpmate indeed! Easily worth my dishwater hands.


Kiloneutral but a little anxious,

CE

Contest Deadline Extended; New Review!

It's come to my attention that although I extended the contest deadline until April 30 that I had only mentioned it at facebook and not here.

Again, to win a hardback copy of "Unexpected Light," send one poem, preferably your best, published or unpublished with "Contest" in the subject line to:

cechaffin (at) gmail (dot) com.

Also there's a new review in A Capella Zoo, short and sweet but insightful, here's the link:

Unexpected Light


Our garden has started to take off and so far one Delphinium was stripped by the deer but I inspected it and the root system was healthy and then I noticed three shoots coming up so I re-planted it. Score: Deer 1, Gardener 1. Also I spread iron pellets last night as I had noticed that a marigold was savaged by a banana slug. This morning I found him dead by the blackberry bramble. I think the marigold in question is still viable. Score: Banana Slug 1, Gardener 1.

Of course the two greatest sins of gardening are overwatering and overfeeding. And the three rules of gardening are: location, location, location. Is it the same with people? The old saw advises, "Bloom where you're planted." But doesn't it help immensely to have the right location, the right family, the right school, the right geography and the right encouragement? I'm so happy in Mendocino that I call it home after three years and hope to live another twenty here in the same rental. Now wouldn't that be a stunt for a peripatetic guy like myself?


Yes, I continue to labor to write a poem a day, skipping a few days, here's today's, a love poem:


Now You Have

On the porch with the Mendocino-blue ocean
before us, Icelandic poppies and apricot twist
and lavender striving towards summer,
I long for you. Beside you in the car
I long for you, even as I hold you in your sleep.
When you must be away I busy myself
while your magnet draws the iron filings of my adoration.
It's not like you were queen—no, that's partly it—
you are my worry stone, my Celtic rose,
my dolmen and my Grail.

Again I notice your legs, creamy and muscular,
your breasts beneath the halter top,
your ass wrapped in black canvas shorts,
but above all your soft face telling me,
“You don't have to do the laundry today, let's spend it together.”
That's where I'd rather be than anywhere,
whether your coronation or me reading
these few lines at Carnegie Hall. I know the same
obtains for you. Each morning we repeat,
“Have I told you today that I love you?”
And the refrain, “Now you have.”


I think for the rest of the month I'll write love poems only. If you were to peruse my book you would see a whole section of love poems at the end, why the book is subtitled, "Selected Poems and Love Poems 1998-2008."

Not much more to report except that I remain rather fearful vis a vis all the mail and paperwork piled up on my desk; I don't think of winning the lottery, rather missing some arcane payment that will land me in poverty again. This attitude goes back to my days as a poor married student. Here is another poem on that very subject:


My Inheritance

I didn't grow up poor
but I fear poverty just like my parents,
who lived through the Depression.
Mom hoarded rubber bands from
throwaway papers and after Dad died,
re-used dental floss.

When Dad was doing well, financially,
he super-glued a loose tooth to his bridge
rather than pay a dentist. He was so proud
until the tooth turned black.
"You gotta make a buck," he'd say.

Mom sampled mystery foods
from Tupperware containers
left in the fridge for weeks.
She couldn't bear to throw a thing out.
"Never marry a woman who cuts
the twine on packages,"she'd say,
winding another orbit around her ball.

After his goods were stolen
and children murdered, Job said,
"What I greatly feared has come upon me".
What my parents feared never did.
Instead fear drove them to plenty
though they were always poor, like me.

(published in Poetry Superhighway)


I wish there were some cure for this neurosis, and when it works, faith is the key. Nevertheless, even if I were rich I think I'd be subject to the same anxiety as it's so deeply inbred. Rockefeller was once asked how much he'd need to feel comfortable: "Just another million," he answered.

I should mention that my shrink, after listening to me tell him that my book wasn't sellling as fast as I'd hoped, said: "I hope you weren't expecting to make money off of a book of poetry. That would call into question your reality testing." Yes, exactly! But hope springs eternal unless you have a foam bed. Ka-Ching!


Thine at 1 kilobunny,

CE

Update

I see now that it's been over a week since my last post, which was only a poem from my poem-a-day discipline during National Poetry Month. I suppose the struggle to come up with a poem daily has superseded my natural return to my blog. And I have so much to report. But I don't know where to start.

First, I have my second reading coming up April 24 at the Mendocino Gallery Bookshop at 6:30 PM. Readings sometimes fill me with trepidation because I don't know how the poems will come across, and I am surprised at the intensity with which they hit me after I read them. I think it was Fellini who said, "All art is autobiographical," and when you read a finished poem out loud to an audience, memory strikes. I know when I have an audience in my hand because it becomes deathly still as everyone concentrates on the next word--ah the pressure, the pressure!

Most fun is attending a reading by a poet with whose work you are familiar. Then you can sort of coast and enjoy your favorites in context.

My middle daughter, Keturah, at 29-yr.-old high school biology teacher, is visiting us this week for the first time in our new domicile with the ocean view. She's relaxing over her spring break, and we've been hiking all over the place, most memorably the Fern Creek Trail Loop at Russian Gulch. We are so spoiled in Mendocino to have so many beautiful places close at hand. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, truly, though the economy here makes it difficult for many.

A lot of homeless adventurers pass through the coast this time of year, many of them Rasta adherents. I never get over the signs, however, that say "Help feed my dog." Why subject a dog to starvation in your travels if you can't feed yourself? The best sign I've seen was a young woman who proclaimed, "Need feminine hygiene products." I'm sure she did, but the thought of contribution was not alluring, however necessary.

In my poem-a-day discipline I have no idea of what quality the poems will eventually assume, as they are all essentially drafts. But here are two new ones, the first a free verse sonnet (a welcome oxymoron):


Praising the Dead

It is easy to praise the dead, to count their deeds
Intentional, heroic. Retrospect
Polishes the blackest silver bright.
Yet to have witnessed them sweating, unstable
How would it feed our need for Shangri La?
We don't want truth, we want legend and myth
As if our ancestors knew what they did
Stumbling through rain with the gift, a coal of fire.
And when they coaxed it in those filthy caves,
We dream of adoration and consensus
Against the yellow eyes that riddled night.
The longer dead, the easier to praise
When almost all were doing what they had
To do and nothing more. God bless the few.


Easter 2009

I've always felt it less than deferential to the Jews
that on our holiest day we crucify a ham with cloves.

Do I need a chocolate Jesus? Do I want a chocolate Jesus?
Dark chocolate for Good Friday, white chocolate for Easter?

And would I bite his head off as with bunnies,
or start with his wounded feet--
they would be wounded, wouldn't they, for realism?

I don't know realism. That's only Hollywood.
But a chocolate Virgin in blue and white foil?
Hail Mary, Mother of sweetness!

To devour her on Easter, yes,
how chocolate, like love, increases its intensity
with each bite, the last propels the next
past need, past any other desiring
until the body shakes with guilt or pleasure.
A woman's love is beyond human measure.


The idea of a chocolate Jesus came to me while driving back home with my daughter from the Oakland airport. I thought it was funny but did not think it would turn into a poem.

Moodwise I experienced quite a dip with smoking cessation on April 1, though I've been using the nicotine patches liberally. Still the patches don't raise your nicotine level to what cigarettes have accustomed you to. And the fight goes on. I'll always be a smoker at a deep level but I want to achieve the consciousness of a non-smoker at another level.

I had my Martin acoustic guitar set up by a local luthier so that now it plays much more easily under the aegis of my disabled left hand (disabled since last year's motorcycle accident). The neurologist tells me that nerves grow one millimeter a day, which means the connection from my spinal cord to my hand will take some three years to recover, but I think to myself that it's better than surgery. I always told patients to avoid surgery if possible; it does violence to the body and recovery is always slower than one expects. Having major surgery is like going through a car crash.

From all my bumps and bruises and major accidents in my life, I sometimes wake (as I did this morning) with generalized pain from my feet to my neck. Aging is not for pussies. The older we get, the more the pain-pleasure principle leans towards pain avoidance. But there's no avoiding pain in my case, just enduring it with the meds my doctor has me on. The lure of painlessness, however, makes me long to smoke opium, something I've never tried and likely never will, because a temporary absence of bodily pain only yields greater pain when it wears off. This is the conundrum of short-acting narcotics--the landing is rocky afterwards.

My new book of poems has now had six reviews, and I'll list the links below. I am hopeful that a groundswell of publicity may eventually increase sales, but selling poetry in America is a slow business, especially on the net, where playing on poetry boards breeds familiarity, and yes, familiarity can breed contempt. "Why should I buy his book? I just critiqued a poem of his I didn't like." Or so I imagine. One friend even wrote me to explain he just couldn't squeeze the cost of the book into his budget, what with the mortgage on his home and retirement property, and despite the fact that he and his wife are both employed. He obviously felt guilty but did I need a financial statement to tell me he was just too cheap and disinterested? LOL!

Of what value, then, is a book of poetry? Of inestimable value when the poet speaks to your heart, though many may miss it and make you less eager to purchase a new volume by a relatively obscure author like myself. At least on facebook I haven't asked anyone to be a fan!

And what is it with all these networking platforms? Twitter must be the ultimate vicarious living, getting updates all the time on your mobile communication device, knowing what the faux celebrity had for breakfast, yada. Isn't it time we started living our own lives? Or will our culture settle for faux lives?

Glad I got that off my chest.

Here are the links to all the current reviews of my book:

Hobble Creek Review
http://utahpoet.blogspot.com/2009/02/sunday-book-review-ce-chaffin.html

Rose and Thorn
http://roseandthornreviews.blogspot.com/2009/02/review-of-unexpected-light-by-wil-hough.html

Eclectica
http://www.eclectica.org/v13n2/ball.html

Loch Raven Review
http://www.lochravenreview.net/2009Spring/george.html

Centrifugal Eye
http://www.centrifugaleye.com/ (pg. 71)

Wordgathering
http://www.wordgathering.com/issue9/book_reviews/chaffin2.html

All for today. Enjoy the spring!


Barely Kiloneutral,

CE

Poem for Day 8 of National Poetry Month

A bit dense and disturbing, but I'm still recovering from the dream poem, #7, already posted:


Remedies for Diffusion

I

When my mind is splintering
I need not to be alone.

Identity's fractionation:
Who will squeeze my arm?

Funhouse mirror, receding view.
Aren't they all thinking of me?

This sickness is unto death,
this sensation of me in distant pieces offered,
when my body hair wakes with air
and I lift toward heaven,
how any part may or may not
cohere, as likely to spin out as orbit in.

II

Is it presumptuous to assume unity from personality,
say from a gladhanding televangelist hawking soap
who feels good about himself with no disunity
between motive and action, money and gospel,
who feels himself one self and not an act
unless it be an act his real self endorses?

Compare this with the redwood shattered
into a million matchsticks, the lost parasols
of a dandelion's head.

Perhaps the primary difference between him and me
is that I can be diffused into a hundred-piece symphony
and he is like a saxophone playing one note at a time,
whole and wholly sequential.

But how does he learn to take for granted
the unity so necessary for every function?
A unity as a mental patient I am forced to fuss about?


III

I digress. What helps? Concentrating
on my typing in the moment of composition,
I attain the identity of an archer fish
shooting a mosquito down by parallax
or the sunyata of the tarantula hawk's orange wings
flapping above its body bent in stinging--
these images concentrate quite wonderfully,
though this comment, “wonderfully,”
again divides me from my self, being an admission
that normally I am not concentrated--
but it's hard to hang on to this, surely
there is also a time for being dispersed
like pollen in a meadow without thought.


I had some mixed medical news as well, which left me feeling particularly mortal. And so it goes.


1 Kilorat,

CE

4 More Poems for National Poetry Month

Aw this is terrible--I'm four days behind in posting my daily poem for National Poetry Month, though I have kept up with the writing elsewhere. So without further ado, and in order, the poems of April 4 to April 7 below:

Day 4

After Gardening

Young Sinatra's on the CD.
I can't think of a contrast more extreme
than his silky tenor and the rude jays.
“One for my baby and one more for the road.”

I play the music low because my love is deaf.
That way she can catch my sound
to go with my moving lips
when I sing along for her.

Last night we spooned with my hand on her mons
and I swelled and craved
yet when I flexed my knees
my legs cramped and awkwardly
(with hand in place)
I had to stretch, moving the dog
off the bed. You can guess
what didn't happen.



Day 5


Of Book Trees

Do not pick a green book,
the print is faint
and there's often no ending.
They also lack that smell of organic
paper and glue and fail
to develop the proper musk.

Paperbacks mature more quickly
but are usually known cultivars
and lack the vigor of hybrids
that hardbacks display.
Still, where the soil is poor
or shade diminishes
the literary vigor of the tree,
occasionally a masterpiece
may appear. These are usually
grafted onto hardback stock
as soon as possible.

Beware a brown book,
usually overwritten or overripe,
stultifying reams of overexplanation
and overelaboration as in how many paradoxes
can fit on the head of a heading.
But you might find Henry James there
or the critical prose of Eliot,
so a discriminating taste
in aged books should be cultivated;
not all the fruit is too dry
for the tongue and eye.

A red book should be picked immediately.
Bright red has the genius of youth,
crimson the wisdom of age.
Size has little to do with taste,
though perhaps more filling
as in Tolstoy vs. Kundera.

Shakespeare and Dante and Homer
come in gold and are common,
having been cultivated for centuries.
The Bible is black but remember,
licorice is bitter then sweet--
like the scroll Jeremiah ate.

Poetry trees are rare
and do best in high desert climates.
The value of the desert
cannot be overemphasized.
Overwatering these trees
may lead to self-indulgence
and plush soil yields verse
like overstuffed Victorian chairs
and you find yourself
wading through syrup
for a kernel of nutrition.
Planted in unforgiving soil,
these trees take care of themselves or not.
Most die before they fruit, it's true,
but the few who flourish are prized
beyond all other books and seldom go stale.
No other books take so long to mature
just like the cone of a Bristlecone pine.

For sheer volume (pun intended)
pulp trees have no peer and can produce
more fruit than any other
though as in a Chinese meal
you may be hungry afterwards.
They are easy and fun to grow
and truth be told, everyone likes them.

The rules for nonfiction trees are simple:
lots of room and lots of light.
Space them too close together
and they share the same opinion.
Allow for too much shade
and the research isn't up to par.

It takes a gift to raise trees for children.
The fruit is magical and monitored by the FDA
for obvious reasons. To farm successfully
you must begin with the concept
of no tree at all, then imagine a tree
as if you were a tree yourself.
If you can't understand these preparations,
don't bother.

Reference trees are orderly as beech forests,
their tall smooth boles spaced widely,
an air of gravity in the light
that floods the oblong leaves.
Silence and history walk there.

And look! There is my book
about survival in the desert--
yes, a book of poetry.
But is it ripe?


Day 6

Ars Thusia

If I could get every pound of flesh,
the whole whale's heart of blubbering humanity
out there on the operating table,

If every swallow in my cortex were crucified
on the windshield, if every cardinal bled brightly
under the lights, the heron choking on an oximeter,

If all my words were compressed from a superfluity
of glottal tides into one book, one slim text
beneath the latex gloves in open dissection,

If all you hear or could not hear were wrapped
in synthetic grape leaves the color of lemon
as an antiseptic precaution before the exploratory,

And if the world came to witness the miracle
of emergence, this pecking at the dragon shell of art
from both sides until black accordion wings

Unfold and fire forks forth, then would it have been worth it,
would it have been worth it all, without the vinegar or gall
to offer up our organs in a dying fall?


Day 7

Dream of the Ex-

Last night I dreamed of my ex-wife
of 20 years ago again, the Queen of Chaos,
obese articulator of logorrhea, spokeswoman
for all that is tangential, forgettable, spewing
cheap chocolates from the Whitman's Sampler
of her mind's crowded trailer park, her laugh
like a donkey 's bray sometimes followed by a snort.

Before the C-section and third child
she had big tits and a nice ass and sex was good,
you know, physically, but afterwards she took to fat
quite naturally, sure as she made our new car smell
of french-fries when I warned her not to let the kids eat in it.
“But they were hungry!” she'd say, as if that made
ketchup on velor excusable.

In the dream I tried to reach my second daughter
but the ex- kept telling me the phone won't work
unless I registered my credit card somehow,
she couldn't explain it, then she could never
explain anything. Meanwhile I kept dialing
while something about jeans in addition to alimony
rattled out, and the plumbing, and Jeopardy--
she could talk to a wall, she could talk to a rock,
lack of sentience was no bar to her apostrophes.
Five bedrooms she had now, a brand new rental
before the coming spaghetti stains, wall gouges,
roaches, ants, weevils and clean and unclean wash
in one pile: the pyramid of mystery clothes.
As a doctor I had lots of time, of course,
to do my own wash, which I did.

These dreams where I splinter with nowhere
to hang the hat of my being, being dispersed
like pollen while the familiar but frightening tractor
flays the furrows of silence with its noise
and constant upheavals as in no dead air time on this station
of a constantly narrated life like hers--

Clearly I never worked through the damage
instead ran like Joseph, sundering time
and place from memory where I quarantined
the contagion of a house where nothing was ever
in the same place twice, where you couldn't walk
barefoot for fear of sticky quantums, leading
to a basic mistrust of carpet and other phobias.
We were good at sex but it wasn't worth the price
if 20 years later I wake up anxious and lost--
Though I did up my medications.


If you muddled through all those rough drafts you deserve a medal, so here:



Feel better?

The last poem about the dream really scared me. I hate when that happens.


At Kiloneutral,

CE

Here's today's poem:

Another Definition

Two Stellar's jays perched
beside the blackberry bramble,
black Mohawks shining
above metallic blue feathers,
Mendocino-blue ocean behind.
Such beauty wed
to such an irritating squawk --

Like a beautiful woman
with a high nasal pitch
and a strong Bronx accent
who won't stop talking
until her defects collect in your mind
and you are forced into
another definition of beauty.


I know the stanzas lack verbs to make them complete sentences, but hey, poetic license. But surely both men and women know the phenomenon of which I speak, where the outward beauty of a person transfixes you until they open their mouth, whereupon the pitch or accent or absence of any substance slowly deflates your initial impression until you wish they were just a silent Playboy doll.

Real beauty is often not symmetric; think of Ingrid Bergman's nose or Meryl Streep's face, women I consider beauties, or how everything about Sophia Loren's face is too big--nose, ears, lips, eyes--but the whole leaves you with such a wonderful impression. Pretty faces are a dime a dozen; true beauty includes character. In fact, until someone reaches their mid to late thirties, can beauty even be intuited without character? I suppose so.

Back to Meryl Streep. Or Glenn Close. Angelina Jolie is sultry but is she beautiful? Besides her pumped-up lips, she has nice features--but she does not strike me as beautiful, or handsome, or even pretty--more sexy, alluring, even a little wicked.

I was once considered good-looking in my pre-pubertal days; in second grade ten girls even held me down, struggling, so Loretta could kiss me. But after puberty my looks went, somehow--all our features get larger as adults, and it's the premature bags under my eyes that really did me in. Besides, my face (except for character) is so terribly average, as this picture will show:



This in turn reminds me of a poem that has not been published, maybe never will be, but as it is virtually my only self-portrait I post it here:


Reflection

See mine, in the window there,
beard quilled in white?
Above, a vast forehead like a desert
as if the skull were pushing through?
Right, a scar from cops' batons
extends my eyebrow, and my mustache
is split by a brass knuckle's kiss.
The right eye's green, the left is blue
with crow's feet spread out
like shatter-proof glass shattered,
then all the luggage below, harvest
of late nights drinking.

Nose, flat and aboriginal,
strong even teeth but yellowed
by smoke and coffee, wide smile,
full lips upcurling at the corners.
Laugh lines outnumber other furrows
though puzzlement grooves much.
Not a rich man's face, it lacks
a certain earthly satisfaction
I hope is free of envy.

II

The poor you have with you always,
the rich man can't help but rub it in,
his mere existence fathers envy
which powers ambition
which feeds achievement
which seeks comparisons
which breed dissatisfaction,
giving birth to envy.

It's not the thorn against the rose
but both against the deer;
the deer make them equals
and the sun, confederates.

III

On and on the human engine runs
toward the swimming pool
purchased on credit
from a second mortgage,
toward the notion
that having all
might cure not having all.
On we fly like wasps
disturbed by a lawnmower,
no furies needed
but our lusts.

The ouroboros of desire,
lugubriously predictable.

How much is that Buddha in the window?


Again I would remind you of this month's contest: send your best poem, published or unpublished, to cechaffin at gmail dot com for a chance to win one of two signed hardback copies of my new book, pictured above.

3 days off cigarettes and I made a mistake today. I had been saving a fine Onyx cigar for the occasion of my quitting cigarettes, but smoking it this morning on the porch while reading William McNeil's "World History" only inflamed my desire for tobacco, duh. If I had a terminal illness I would take up smoking again, truly. As I prefer the best hand-rolling tobacco, on April 1 the taxes on it went up astronomically by $5 a pound. Packs of cigarettes will now exceed $6 in California; as I recall, New York is even worse. But what can you do if you're an addict? Quit, pay the price, or make contact with smugglers from Mexico where cigarettes are still under $2 a pack.

Some of you may remember when I posted my long poem, "The Deprivathon," here. It was all about quitting but I managed to start again. Here's a link to the page where the poem appears entire for any interested. It is not my best work, though inspired (pun intended) in places. In fact, here's one movement from it:

VI

I saw the spirit of fire,
Tobaccohontas
in her coronet of coals
dancing in a leaf skirt
of golden brown,
her incendiary thighs

burning burning burning

Before her only God breathed fire.
Afterwards came dragons,
venomous snakes and toads.
Finally man's penis swelled
and woman's labia grew
bloody-purple, pink and wet.

I heard Tobaccohontas speak:

"I burn for you, Brave.
Do not forget your love.
Cleave me with your tomahawk,
undo the seam so lightly stitched by nature
or my own nails will ream it,
drive your spear into the ravenous slit
beneath the golden curls of my mons,
pound me as a bear ruts a sow in a ditch
littered with acorns and salmon bones.
My mouths have swallowed
the seed of many warriors, come."

Ah, Tobaccohontas,
I once fingered your moist fragrance
in blue pouches of Drum tobacco.
Your scent still calls to me
from the tent of the elders
with their pipe of bone and feathers
but moderation is beyond me.
I must devour and be devoured.
Hear me now:

My lava grows hard in your ocean.
Your undersea cleft shapes me.
My tip breaks off like a coal in your wet purse.
I shudder, deflate and die.
You are the siren of my death.
I stub you out in ashtrays
as if they were vampire coffins
through which to pound my filter.
Now I can only inhale
the memory of your forbidden pleasure
and cast its usage toward some future
beyond obsession. Forgive me
Princess; you were the best.


Now I've certainly given you enough to read for one day. The key to quitting smoking, I've discovered, is not to smoke no matter what. And if you do stumble and bum one, get right back on the horse--don't globalize and say, "Oh, I've started again." No, that is what your unconscious wishes through its chemical addiction. Reason tells us that we can quit again and again and again and if we quit enough the moments shall be sewn together and formed into a pleasant curve as in the Calculus.


At 1 Kilobunny (though feeling a little edgy despite the nicotine patch),

CE

New Review; 2 New Poems

A new review of "Unexpected Light" (the fifth!) has just appeared in Eclectica. Have a look.

I've now got thirty songs up on Soundclick. Have a listen and report back.

I'm writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month, however bad. Here are the first two for April 1 and 2nd:

1)

Craving

I want a hand-rolled cigarette,
only the best tobacco--
I am not an amateur.
I have been at this a long time.

Brown-gold leaf
rolled in sweet rice paper
warm rush inhaled
from a thousand thousand fires
our ancestors kindled
announcing mastery
to predator and prey,
carried by coals
from cave to cave.

Blast of nicotine
brain to attention,
galvanometers will tell you
what you already know:
this drug will juice you
this drug will goose you
there's no excuse, you
Your mustache reeks of it.
You've stained your teeth with it.
Your gums recede from it.

This magic smoke
will stiffen your bronchi
and petrify the air sacs
into fibrosed honeycombs.
Then there's the cough, hack,
mucus, wheeze, blow, cough,
hack cycle, searching for butts
in the sand of the theater tray,
freezing your ass off at night
'cause nobody gets to smoke inside.

Let me go, Tobacco,
from the valley of my addiction
to the mount of holiness
from the pit of my damaged will
to the city of willingness.
Make me transparent as water,
let no cell go unturned,
untwist the mutated DNA
in my distant bronchioles,
say halt to plaque in coronaries, too.

I'll burn sage in my doorway
to the departed spirits of fire
from a thousand thousand fires
once carried as coals
all in homage, desperate homage
to the fiery rootlets you have lodged
deep in my mind's pre-history.


2)

Not Taxidermy

Who has shut the fortress
of my mouth and trashed
the drawbridge of my tongue?
Whence my silence?
I was a poet once,
words spilled out of me
like coins from a slot machine.
I'd collect them in rolls
organized by topic and flair
and call it poetry.
Now the machine won't spit
a silver metaphor,
much less a copper one.

I once calculated
how much I'd earned
by writing poetry.
It came to pennies an hour,
pennies an hour.
The minimum wage
in California is $8.
I should have mopped
McDonald's floors
or stuffed burritos at Del Taco.

But all of this is false collage,
pastel paper on wet cardboard.
You know the real reason:
It's a disease, this scribbling,
Gypsy dance of fingers,
a mania for exploring attics,
for squeezing fruit until unrecognizable,
give me a young mind to mold
and I'll squeeze all the juice out of it
and drink it up as a transfusion
for my poor enervated muse.

Beware, old poets can be parasites.
They want the glory of the disease,
not the stolid echo of past publications
hanging like dried roses
around a stuffed horse's head.
Stuffed horses, yes, what Roy Rogers
had done to Trigger, there's a feat
for any taxidermist to admire.
They want the real horse,
the one out to stud,
not for the glue farm.


This pieces are rough drafts and not to be mistaken for considered, polished pieces.

I have neglected this blog of late. Perhaps new poems will keep me posting.


1 Kilobunny,

CE

This and That

My stepson just got a bill for a one-night stay in the hospital: $45,000, I kid you not. He fell off of his motorcycle and had one laceration stapled on his head. I called Sutter Health. Here are some of the charges:

CT scans $6000

Trauma Room $4000

Stapling a superficial laceration in the trauma room: $8000

Of course he can't pay it, and the billing person I spoke to is going to send him a "charity" application. You wonder what's wrong with the healthcare system? It's unbelievably expensive, and Sutter Health does all it can to make a payday.

Determined to start a garden once again before the deer get hungry, I spent $250 on flowering plants only yesterday, eschewing all vegetables, and most of the flowers are in the daisy/poppy category, supposedly deer resistant--although deer will eat anything when they're hungry, in my experience. I love poppies, though. Showy, primitive flowers with four petals (Icelandic), though I've put in some new varieties.

It's hot on the coast today, maybe 70 and windy. I'm soaking the new plants for fear they may dry out. I must interrupt this post to move the soaker.

Back! For any who missed the announcement, I now have 24 songs ready for free download from Soundclick; all you need to do is click on the picture of me playing bottleneck in the upper right corner here. Feedback welcome; some cuts are professional studio work, some rough cuts at home on this very computer. My voice will soon improve when we quit smoking again on April 1, no fooling. But I pride myself most on melody, which I find in short supply in much contemporary music, to say the least.

I've been fighting a cold but it was suppressed by the prednisone I took for a week to combat my tick bite allergy; the prednisone also had me flirting with depression. Powerful stuff. Steroids, NSAIDs and antihistamines are all dangerous drugs for causing depression in my case. Our brain chemistry is weird, what?

In April some new reviews of my book will be out in Eclectica and Pedestal and elsewhere, I think. I'll post them here, naturally.

Tonight at our men's circle I'll be leading a discussion group on "The River of Life: Embracing the Feminine," the topic I hope will be picked up for this year's retreat. I'll be going through Jung's four female archetypes, from Eve to Helen to Mary to Sophia. Each represents ongoing progress in understanding the feminine, and Sophia is the internalization of the feminine--as my friend, Kelton, says: "I'm married to my inner bitch." LOL!

So far I've received only five entries in the contest for a signed hardback copy of "Unexpected Light." I need more entries! Simply mail them with the subject header "Contest" to cechaffin at gmail dot com.

That's all for today, save the obligatory poem. Let me look through my unpublished archives, as I have not written much of anything for a week. Ah, this seems appropriate as it is nearly Easter:


The Arrest

They thought it would be easy
to cow him with eagled breastplates
and the clank of scabbards on greaves
until they saw the royal
toleration in his eyes.

In the glaze of a Mideastern sun
he could have been Apollo.
“If any man thirsts, let him come after me”
--a thirst beyond Roman canteens.

“No man spoke like this man,”
they told their fuming captain.
He knew better than to go himself;
his god had warned him.


1 Kilobunny,

CE

p.s. I just re-read this post and felt ashamed--this boy seemed so full of himself that trivial detail passes for blog material. He's worse than the Confessionalist poets. But I promise to repent.

Rototilling; New Old Poem

First, as to the poetry contest here and at Facebook I've received only four entries thus far which make the odds of winning 50%. I'm sure there are many of you waiting until the April 15 deadline, just be sure to get your entries in with your taxes and don't forget to send me the refund.

Today, at some cost to my back, I rototilled the garden and planted some spring flowers to go with those already blooming. My goal is to have the whole yard littered in color. I'm trying mainly to plant the daisy family, as they are supposed to be deer-resistant. I also have my deer-repelling motion-activated sprinkler turned on. I want to plant many perennials as well, so they will continue to bloom every year. I'm a haphazard gardener at best; I learn as I go. I find out what works and try to duplicate it. But this I know: the rules for planting are just like the rules of real estate: location, location, location!

I'm excited about my soundclick page where there are now no less than 24 songs for your downloading pleasure, a number I intend to increase to 100 over the coming months. I have such a backlog of compositions I've never recorded seriously that I have a lot of pleasurable work ahead of me, though I need a bass guitar desperately to fill out the sound. My Fender bass is presently in the hands of my former bass player in Oceanside, CA, and I don't know how to get a hold of him.

The whales are still moving north here to their feeding grounds in the Bering Sea and below. We saw them spouting this morning when it was calm.

I'm happy to report that my garden has a healthy population of earthworms. After rototilling today, Kathleen said: "And now you've doubled them!"

It was my younger brother's birthday yesterday and I failed to call him, but he called me tonight to make up for it (that is, before 12 AM so it was still his birthday). I'm trying to think of a gift for him besides a CD or a book but it's hard. Remember buying gifts for Dad? How he must have tired of ties and pens. At least my girls always send me Simpsons or Lakers stuff.

As you can see, I have little to say tonight. Here's my soundclick link again for free downloading of songs by Dr. C.

There are songs there on everything from organ donors to reggae doctors to conspiratorial flounders. Truly eclectic in substance and style. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Here's an unpublished poem for my sign-off:


Back to Sleep

I went back to sleep and saw
the scorched ruins of my philosophy
begging for green wood
though I wouldn't ax a sapling
for my greater good.

I went back to sleep and saw
the Madonna of the Tortilla
in blue maize and white flour.
“Your time has come," she said
though it was not my hour.

I went back to sleep and saw
the present swallow the future
as the past swallowed the present
then woke with a start to the clock
that said I was and I wasn't.


Thine at 1 Kilobunny,

CE