You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Your date makes much more sense than ours. It’s closer to the harvests, for starters. And it’s always on the second Monday in October, a plus when planning for travel.
In addition, it’s not being crowded out by all the Holidays shopping buildup, either.
Once again, I’d say you’re the more civilized side.
Enjoy the turkey and pie, too.
Fine art is, after all, an extension of religion. Just look at museums, concert halls, theaters, even arenas as temples.
That said, here goes:
Proprietors: Middle-class or desiring to move up, the kulcher-seekers. Subcategories those seeking familiarity with the old, beside those with “taste,” a little knowledge of “masters.”
Those dragged through: Spouses, dates, children.
Those seeking Experience: Usually modernists with “taste” but possibly those seeking play within art, qualities antithetical to where art must be “serious.”
Fellow practitioners: Usually too poor to collect new work except by trading, but also the most critical and appreciative, depending.
Now, for atheists and agnostics?
After drafting this, I see parallels to dining out for fine cuisine or attending concerts, live theater, even cinema.
Care to add to the list?
The Hunter is typically a male, an image of strength and tribe. In this case, Truckers.
Citizens’ Band radio, take a totem, new name for self:
with a talking stick / in your hand, in the air / at the wheel of an 18 / yes, eighteen-wheeler
Sometimes talking four-wheeler, too:
“Four-wheeler, she’s clear”
that is, not a Bear
“Ya got ears”
“Keep an eyeball out for”
~*~
Time check
Road check
~*~
“At 205, Eight-O
westbound Bear flipping around”
~*~
“Green stamps” are dollar bills
(reflecting store promotion trading stamps
of the time)
hence, “on the green stamps”
means turnpike tolls
perhaps bridges, too
~*~
“Was you in Harrisburg Pee A last night?
I was a-talkin’ to you”
~*~
In Gilligan’s Island, meaning Ohio
during Governor Gilligan’s term
“The Bears got seventy-five dollars out of me,
lost you,” meaning fine paid
A rig is reported doing “a roly-poly,” that can’t be good.
The signoff of departing or divergent interchanges:
Wonder where they all are now.
In the Far East there is a vital, well-read proletariat literature – speaking for a people.
Here, we have intellectuals playing games. Along with populist idiots.
Still, how much of the Far West book scene I knew revolved around poetry-conscious, well-stocked bookstores that were also patrons to readings, broadsides, and small private volumes.
Suppose, now, a poetry journal allied with a bookstore where its authors’ books could be purchased …
This was pre-Internet, which has opened new opportunities, or before I knew of radical publisher and bookseller Giles Calvert and his Black Spread Eagle on Ludgate Hill near St. Paul Cathedral in London, the voice of many early Quaker tracts and volumes.
Previous posts this year have presented my curiosity in petroglyphs and petrographs even before I relocated to the Pacific Northwest and saw them in the wild. That time in my life was accompanied by a growing appreciation of tribal mythologies, which I believe enhances an understanding of the region’s unique biosphere. Living at the edge of the Yakama reservation meant the ancient stories I was reading were local news.
The Indigenous spirit was something I missed in my dwelling-places since in my moves eastward across the Midwest, Baltimore, and then New Hampshire.
Eastport, however, with its Passamaquoddy legacy and presence, has revived that. The tribe somehow survived oppression and is rediscovering and reclaiming much of its culture, thanks to the pioneering efforts of individuals like the late Wayne A. Newell, who wrote more than 40 books in the supposedly dying Passamaquoddy language before his first book in English in 2021, Kuhkomossonuk Akonutomuwinokot, Stories Our Grandmothers Told Us.
The late Fredda Paul was doing something similar within herbal medicine and healing lore, while also continuing the storytelling tradition. They are both deeply missed.
Tribal historian Donald Soctomah has furthered their work. These days, he’s part of a circle documenting and preserving the local petroglyphs in the face of rising sea levels. His online presentation earlier this year with the Border Historical Society in Eastport had me realizing I may have been overlooking impressions here – many are stippled into the rock surface in a way that they’re visible only early in the morning or late afternoon, especially if the stone is wetted. A video, A Song of the Drum, and several short YouTube videos from Machiasport can be found for free online.
Another wonderful video, Rhythm of the Heart, on the life of birch-bark canoe maker David Moses Bridges, is also available for free online. It’s a moving testimony. He passed way too early.
Tribal dancing at Sipayik is a major community activity at the annual Passamaquoddy Days gathering. It does bring back memories for me of the Native dance competitions (and big jackpots for winners) when thousands from across the continent gathered for Tinowit in the Yakima Valley. This is much smaller and closer to home, in more ways than one.
My introduction to Native drum circles came at the annual Tinowit pow-wow on the Yakama reservation in Washington state. That event is much larger than the more relaxed annual Passamaquoddy Days gathering near my home in Maine today, but drum circles are still an important part of the culture and identity. By the way, the Passamaquoddy emphasize that their celebration is NOT a pow-wow. There are some formal distinctions.
Some parts of my life today, here in the easternmost corner of the USA, echo my experiences in the interior Pacific Northwest. Dancing at the Passamaquoddy Days, which tribal members pointedly say is not a powwow, is one of those. At the Yakama reservation’s Tinowit, the event was much larger and more established. Here, it’s more a sense of rediscovery and reconnection, which has its own sense of excitement, especially as the younger members of the community gain familiarity with those roots.
Most poets write of themselves or lovers or at least things around them: poetry as a conversation with yourself. Or maybe God, on a good day.
