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.

 

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.

 

Halloween (1977): 22 inches of new snow in Cayuse Pass, 4 in Snoqualmie Pass, two of our routes to Seattle … winter was already closing in.

The kid wrecked the Capri while trying to use the CB he had received for his birthday the night before. Had he been in the Triumph, he’d be dead.

From loose letters, carbon copy, Nov. 28, a now obsolete form of address: “Sirs:” Even “Sir” becomes questionable.

windy night
gusts to 55 mph
highway speed

not feeling well
as Kitty smelled on my breath

~*~

6 Nov, Wednesday, new car arrived today. Feels solid, runs beautifully.

Looking back, I’m surprised that we went with Subaru, at the time a new entry into the U.S. market. I draw a blank at trying to remember the process of signing all the papers or how I even picked up the car, considering that we (make that Kitty) decided we’d keep our VW Bug which had no trade-in value. 

That night, I surprised Kitty by driving up to E’Burg.. She loves the new car, its size and color. Took her to dinner.

Back at her apartment, a knock at the door. Two officers checking a strange odor in the hallway, fearing it might be more than rotting garbage. Inquiring about the neighbors. Any elderly? How long the smell? (A week.) Have you seen them recently? (Later she said her neighbor had been crying the day before. She almost offered her a ride to cheer her.) (Wait? In what?) On my drive home, I wondered: Did her neighbor kill the boyfriend she was kicking out? Is Kitty safe? She wouldn’t have answered the door if I weren’t there. Did the officer parked behind my car take down my license plate number? What was he radioing so long? They said a sheriff’s deputy reported the smell, but what was he doing in the building in the first place? Intrigue and foreboding, I presume …

Small-town cops, I’d say now, or perhaps federal ICE agents.

~*~

Mid-November

Snow flurries,
large flakes
briefly at noon

Nancy and Len’s visit all the way to our shack near Wapato, south of Yakima … [surprised to see they did that, though she had parents in the Seattle area … wish I had more!] Sleeping bags on our floor? She was a fine bubbly presence in our Indiana University endeavor.

Kitty’s been asked to place two of her sculptures in a Central [State University] show this spring — it’s by invitation only. Any reassurance she finds will quickly fade …

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

As for poetry? “Wonder if my work adds up to summa, if it has a point” …

The night before (so where were we?): “the aging aesthete dismissing Pfingston’s piece, ‘This isn’t a poem,’ as though he knew, this uptight, pretentious high-school teacher whose 30 friends kept clinging to him, whispering comments about ‘classical forms’ and the ‘need for discipline’ and keeping a guard against ‘imitators’ and how Joan Stone can’t STAND Duane Niatum, ‘He borrows everything.’”

“That’s what happens when you get a PhD,” I almost said.

How many tall tumblers did that guy down — a dozen? How can any drunk evaluate a poem, appreciated its silence?

I’m tired of veneer, tired of poetry tasters — everything but the purely original, primitive, religious incantation …

[I had not yet delved into Jackson Cope’s “incantatory language” perspective on early Friends …]

When a batch of submissions go out, the first back are quick rejection slips — usually overstocked — then the mixed bag of acceptances and misses — and finally the slow anguish of almost-takens and those returned unread …

It’s almost a pattern

~*~

Wollah Wollah = whistling water = Walla Walla

~*~

When Coyote desired Beaver’s beautiful daughter, Rain sent his own beautiful daughter to plead with Coyote, who instead tried to rape her and make her his other wife. And thus, enraged, Rain punished the east — Coyote’s land — by raising the Cascades mountains so that Coyote and Wind could not steal all the clouds.

I’m left wondering about Beaver and his child.

~*~

Meanwhile, these local poets and artists who don’t study, don’t know what’s been done before, wouldn’t recognize ancient excellence, don’t know what’s being done now, don’t experience the nature out there or the scary, untapped energy fields within themselves … who don’t try to make each piece unique but merely a repetition of their static non-discovery closed-in closed-off non-lives …

[How’s that for non-judgmental?]

~*~

Hops, which are used to favor and stabilize beer in its brewing, were another famed agricultural product from Yakima. The vines would climb the ropes to the top, with the whole vines being cut down at harvest. Note Mount Adams in the background. (Photo by William Borg via Wikimedia Commons.)

~*~

 I used to write poems about the weather. But what can you say about a place where the weather’s always good? Only that the wind’s blowing?

[Think of a comment I recently heard, about a poetry editor who scorned Weather Report pieces. Gave them an instantaneous rejection.]

~*~

Watching clouds 50 miles away.

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.