My journal, Vol. 53, started on 13 Feb. 79. “So long since the magic” and MEDICINE BIRD inscribed on the inside cover. [Well, it was February!]
Includes the Power of Animals conference … look at spinning that off as a Chronicle [which I did, now available as a free booklet my Thistle Finch blog]; mention the theater performance of Coyote stories … in my timeline, I’m surprised that this comes after the trip to Victoria, though that makes sense for me now, considering the experience in the museum of the coastal lodges through the cold, wet months …
The way out of the place I am (poetry/politics/employment) is by the way I came in.
More or less.
The Real Work goes on anywhere you engage it.
~*~
In these rounds of place, the poems keep coming!
25 Feb ’79
Letter and return of mss from Sam Hamill. Difficulty of critique for one more typing. Following a letter from Jorg, with need for some other poetry revisions. In all, three books and not enough time.
Asanas / Vasanas
DOWN INTO THE BODY
poems seated into positions, possibly
Creeley’s attempt to obliterate all references to concrete world, sticking instead to abstractions, so that even his beach or moon remain words in the mind rather than specified points in space.
Here I am, sharing Snyder’s distrust of “head games” with all their blinking ego.
Meanwhile, Ginsberg weighs in with breath, chanting, sound, the whole world of Love: Ahimsa!
Somebody, somewhere, dismissing Snyder as a “Polaroid poet,” a line striking me as a Polaroid critic. Yet I must wonder whether my poems are just reflecting snapshots or am I instead crystalizing moments of awe and wonder as they manifest as relationships?
Whenever I return to verse, I want a wild WHOLE MAN IN craziness … twisting yet singing
I’m tired of seeking precision. The revisions are wearing me out.
As for rejections? Should I send them out again? Postage bills?
Where has this decade gone? Still no book in type. Seven or eight years of expectation, the last two so close. The last year, “deception.” The novel, torn up like asphalt.
Building up, cleaning out, going for the knock-out. My own.
Story idea: first-person singular, semi-fictional: DAYTON. It would open on Grandpa’s porch — the light, plum tree, mailbox, chains of the swing / then inside, wallpaper, Barcalounger, attic, windows, giant fan. North Room. Pipeyard. Euclid Avenue, church, farmers market, pigs feet, Boy Scouts. Our own colorless existence. Crawdads. The fort under the damp pine tree. Shaker farms turned into state hospital. Backpacking. Suburban sprawl. Neglected neighbors, resentments. Antioch, Waynesville, etc.
The importance would be fragmentary details. My natural history museum classes, Art Institute (the armor, mummies, plaster gone!). The Ford dealer’s Kodiak bears. Saturday morning comics (newspaper and TV, too) … funnies being read to us in our parents’ bed, with new ones on Sunday …
The Stone / Jorg project. So strange working on a project with no idea of where it’s heading. Book? Chapbook? Shared volume. With so little control over its shape, unpublished poems selected by an editor. A range of voice and form in the batches he’s already selected, but it’s not work I would have placed together. I can only write and ship, letting the rest take it’s own shape.
I hope Jorg “rhymes” with me, in Sam Hamill’s phrasing.
Jorg accepted “Wind. The Cloth. My Mind” but rejected two other poems outright and felf another was too much was like snapshots or a personal photo album …”
A high country trail at Mount Rainier National Park, photo by Elizabeth Carbaja at Pexels. The air smelled quite different in the surrounding forest as well as in the sub-alpine terrain above.
~*~
Kitty, reflecting on Whiz’s gallery show: “$45 a strange price for a picture; $30 is tops for one range, then skips to say $60. He should have had some small things, framed, that would sell and then some big things, matted, for showing.”
Coming from? “Nobody in art teaches marketing.”
Plus: “One thing I learned for [Bill] Dunning — I can put together a super portfolio. Everybody remarks on how impressive our portfolios are.”
For the most part, photography was rarely esteemed as “fine art.”
~*~
In my dream, two readers, small mag editors most likely, “We don’t change much — tone down outright statements, make the endings stronger.” Me, holding their first issue with somebody standing over my shoulder: “What went wrong? This stuff’s mostly trash!”
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
