In E’burg, met a poet — Richard Danner — who couldn’t put his wife in a poem until they split, after 12 years of marriage, allowing him to write a book, Single Space. And how jealous they became of the other’s writings.
There’s a dilemma of consider her as an objective subject to be, um, exploited.
Maybe some things deserve to remain private.
Pflum said the words he likes to use are the conditionals: if, then, because, ad infinitum: the words of logic, of possibility, of thought itself …
Yet they often dilute the action. Somehow, they work for him, though.
Kentucky Fried Movie opens with the line, “The popcorn you are eating has been pissed in,” and deteriorates from there.
I have so many overdue books from the library yet don’t want to return them just now.
The Ellensburg library has a whole set of early Cetra opera LPs. Unlike Yakima’s.
20 Apr
Finished the longpoem.
Kitty phoned, depressed, wouldn’t say why.
Why do I put up with it?
Off to the office. [Was I journaling early a.m., after meditation etc.?]
Flow of revisions, largely the Leonard Springs pieces …
Cherries deep red, about to be picked …
Perfection versus sterility
The bounty of the prairie: abide in it
Milton! Getting down to him at last … his head and heart going in opposite directions … damn theology but his heart betraying that in the few moments it can. He was blind to more than vision.
Ideas for revising Native tales: use Bob White or even Rbt. White for quail. Logger, Cutter, even Sawyer for beaver. Cops, FBI, CIA, spooks for monsters or evil spirits. Lawyers for lazy characters or blue jays. Jesus for coyote. Update and urbanize, satirize modern society. Consider quaint spellings for Wyatt, Philip, Sidney, William, Dunbar, etc.
Weave in some glare and grime.
In English poetry, the weight of Christian doctrine closing the range of thought and sensibility to a single, predictable line. Thus, the wonder of Blake’s singular accomplishments.
20:VI
A letter from Copper Canyon Press, wanting to publish my book if “patronly folks” will come through with “essential cash” … great letter, exciting potential (retitle and some revising) …
Also, from Celeste, a tearsheet from a Seattle weekly reinterpreting the Mexican movie Chac, about a “diviner” who carves out his own heart at the end: this piece now viewing the events through Native perspectives … {We had seen the movie at one of Seattle’s art film houses.]
My compulsive reading, a suppressed hunger
Revising poems with a tape recorder … a whole new perspective …
24 Sept Sunday
Heard Bill Stafford read last night in E’burg at Washington State Poets Assn or some such … Grimes and Bodeen were there to sell Yakimas that had just come out the day before. Audience mostly elderly, stout ladies who sighed over lines and applauded single works. I get tired of so many short pieces that fail to break through the prose barrier and do the magic in the backcountry of so much of today’s verse, the realm so few have entered. Grimes said Stafford had done an amazing reading at Cedar Falls, hardly said a word except for what he read, but here he was explaining each one or offering some kind of patter for it. I said he was playing to his audience, and BG agreed fully. Two pitchers of beer for Grimes and me, Bodeen ordering root beer — “this tastes like tomato juice” — getting red beer instead, finally settling on strawberry. First time since he was 17 he’d gone a week without alcohol — “ttat’s seven days, not five,” Grimes explained.
The owner said he had hired Kitty “to give the joint some class”
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
