Tag: Poetry

FACING THE TECHNOLOGY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Shifting to the world of epublishing has stimulated a gentle learning curve for me. Maybe because my to-do list has always been much longer than I can manage or maybe because I felt I already had too much detailed work at hand, I’ve tried to avoid becoming a computer geek who spends all his time in the technical minutia. Actually, it’s the same way with my cars – I don’t want to spend my mornings, afternoons, or weekends under the hood or on my back under the chassis; I just want to get in and drive. As for high tech, I’ll wait for all the bugs to get worked out before I buy the updated version, thank you, especially since I’ve always been on a very limited budget. And for the record, I hate Windows 8, which is always interrupting my work by blowing its apps in my face or requiring me to log on again throughout the day.

On the other hand, keyboarding on a computer has been a vast improvement over a typewriter, at least for klutzes like me, and the ability to correct and revise as I go or rewrite and edit later is, well, divine. Sometimes progress really is progress.

And sometimes it isn’t, as we seemed to discover at the office each time we moved on to a new system whether we wanted to or were instead forced to when our current equipment was declared obsolete. (I’ll let others relate those nights of terror when they pulled the plug on what was finally working as promised.)

Participating in the small-press literary scene has been another matter. When I first ventured into email, thanks largely to my now-wife, well, let’s say broadband’s been a huge improvement over those telephone connections and leave it at that. Still, cutting and pasting poems into the email and having them accepted within hours rather than be rejected months later was quite an eye-opener. These days, with most of the liveliest literary action happening in online journals, the process has taken leaps forward; typically, you use a submissions program, upload your file, insert your cover letter, and follow the pieces through the editorial process, if you wish. For a long time, I tried to maintain two sets of files – one for journals that still used, or even required, submissions via the Postal Service, and those that took them online. This year, finding that too complicated, I decided to drop the postal-only journals altogether. (That move, let me add, was hastened by problems with our computer printer as much as the much higher rejection rate on the envelope entries.)

The 2005 publication of my second novel, Ashram, as an ebook was another eye-opener. I was surprised by how easy its preparation was, how quickly it went from acceptance to general availability, and how pleasurable reading a long work on my computer screen could be (even if the work was issued only in PDF format). Unfortunately, we were also a bit ahead of the ebook reading trend and many would-be readers told me of their difficulties in downloading the volume. The other snag was getting the work reviewed at all – even online critics stuck solely to paper editions.

Blogging has revolutionized much of this world, probably more than we realize. For me, avowed neo-Luddite that I am, WordPress has been heavenly. It’s allowed me to take a model “out of the box” and run with it without modification, even if I do admire the customized tweaks many of the rest of you add apparently without hassle. The Blogs That I Follow, searching by topical tags, and Freshly Pressed streams have introduced me to many wonderful voices around the globe for my daily perusal. In fact, I’m still struck that in its first year, the Red Barn had readers in 72 countries. Amazing.

These days I’m learning again. The opportunity to publish my novels to be distributed across a variety of platforms (as they say) has meant following a new set of directions to strip out all the hidden codes (we hope; some of mine go back to the first versions on WordPerfect4.0) and set up the work to flow smoothly in a reading device. (I started to say “reader,” but for me, that will always be a person, not a machine.) I’ll admit that adjusting to the concept of considering a long work as a continuous text, rather than pages, has been major, as has the matter of inserting hyperlinks. Remember, I’m someone who loves the art of printing from its very origins. (How many Gutenberg Bibles have you seen?)

Even so, I’m excited by the new opportunities and the new visual dimensions.

Here we go, again.

ATTUNED TO THE PULSING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Back in the late ’70s I attended a weeklong interdisciplinary conference at Fort Warden State Park on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, an event that remains a potent influence on my work and thinking. Organized by Sam Hamill, then of Copper Canyon Press, the Power of Animals seminar spanned biology, literature, anthropology, mythology, and more. Presenters included the writers Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Howard Norman (then just the author of a chapbook of poems called Born Tying Knots), David Lee, and an equally impressive slate of zoologists and botanists in an interdisciplinary examination of the dimensions of the animal kingdom. One highlight was a stage production from Reed College that relived some of the glorious Coyote tales of the Pacific Northwest.

In a Heartbeat

Now, with the release of my chapbook In a Heartbeat from Barometric Pressures at Kind of a Hurricane Press, I hope to return the favor. This set of poems runs playfully with wild and domestic animals of all sizes and influences as they impact our lives in real and imaginary ways.

To join in, simply click here. And remember, it’s free.

NATURALLY, AT LAST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

The Barometric Pressures author series at Kind of a Hurricane Press has just published In a Heartbeat, a set of 20 of my poems arising in the animal kingdom. As you can imagine, I’m delighted. Let me roar and crow, if you will.

The set occupies a much different tone and style of my writing from what you’ve previously seen. It ranges from television cartoon characters to ancient mythology as it traces our interplay with our fellow animals across the earth, under the sea, into the air, and throughout our imaginations.

Here's the cover.
Here’s the cover.

This 35-page echapbook is available free from the Barometric Pressures author series at Kind of a Hurricane Press.

If you decide to print yours out, you might even want to select a fancy paper to make your copy unique.

Let me add, that way I’ll be even happier to autograph yours when we meet. But first, for your copy, click here.

SAGEBRUSH AS A STATEMENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The diamond hitch is a top-of-the-line knot, especially useful in cowboy, mining, or logging country – or, as I apply it, the desert foothills of Washington state found east of the Cascade mountains. Forefront in my related set of poems is the unspoken recognition of diamond hitch as marriage, with its implied images of diamond ring and getting hitched. In the background, also unvoiced, is the diamond symbol of the clear and enduring heart – further extended to intense spiritual quest, as The Diamond Sutra (Vajrachchedika in Sanskrit) demonstrates, found also in the Buddhist linkage of diamond to Dharma. In addition to serving as an emblem for the open range of the American Far West, sagebrush, moreover, suggests wisdom, spice, even the Burning Bush of Moses – the profound influence desert has upheld for prophets and mystics over the millennia.

A TURN IN THE GARDEN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As the hot, humid weather kicks in, we shift gears. Our weeding turns lazy, and our plants will just have to fight it out for survival. If we’re diligent, we’ll water, though the utility bill frightens.

Maybe it’s all part of the relationship.

~*~
Of Devis and Other Spirits

A garden without a woman is lamentable

unfolding from Eve
and the Singer of the Song of Songs

 all this color and excitement

my Woman wears no cosmetics
she’s organic
but oh so much better for me
than health food

my Lady leads me in unanticipated ways
she’s so unlike the ones before her
she works with wise fingers without hesitating
to get dirt under her nails

still, as the younger one said,
“you’re a mean mommy:
you’re as mean as the thorns in a buckle bush”

In constructing her garden

sod, roots woven tight, close together
the way I thought we would

overlooking the fact we both flower
quite conspicuously

our stems woody or thorny
even through winter

 poem copyright 2014 by Jnana Hodson

CHANGING STYLE, CHANGING TASTE, CHANGING DIRECTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Driving any of my back routes to the beach, I pass impressive houses that have views of the water. Often, they’re old estates reflecting established money. Some are infused with history. Some are large, with four or more chimneys. Others are cozy cottages with four-season porches.

For much of my life, I would have dreamed of owning such a place.

Lately, though, there’s been a sea-change in my perspective. Part of it is no doubt my arrival at a point in life called retirement, although for me it’s been more a matter of culminating focus on the Real Work, as the poet Gary Snyder calls it. Another part of it has to do with stripping away all of the competing visions of where I thought my life might have been heading. The two dovetail, actually.

When I was starting out, I held often contradictory goals. As one date once admitted, she couldn’t decide whether I’d been in a corner office in a Manhattan tower or in an artist’s garret 10 years hence, and she wasn’t far off the mark, even before the ashram intervened.

Of course, the corner office and the house overlooking the water both assume a sizable income, and that was never in the offing for a journalist unless I somehow became publisher at a young age. Unlikely from the outset, but all the more so once the hippie movement kicked in.

Even so, as a writer, there was always the dream of the blockbuster novel that became a hot movie, but my work kept veering more and more toward the experimental while the publishing industry kept constricting. You get the picture.

You could add to that the possibility of a wealthy girlfriend or the talented one whose career took off big time, but both of those went up in smoke. Or whatever.

Come to think of it, the dream wasn’t just about houses. You could figure in the shiny cars, too, or a sailboat or global travel.

The vision, as it turned out, included an entire lifestyle. An exteneded family with a handful of my own kids, at the least, running around. Many friends and business acquaintances, along with political connections, all coming to stay in the guestroom or guesthouse. A fully stocked library with an impressive collection. An art collection, too.

What it didn’t include was the life I’ve wound up living. Much smaller scale. As a writer, what I really require is blocks of uninterrupted time and solitude. Let’s be honest. A studio can be not much larger than a closet, for that matter.

As for the big place? It would need household staff, for one thing. And a long list of handymen.

What I have instead is an old house and its barn in a small city, along with a common car with 250k on the speedometer. It’s more than enough to handle, even before adding the family.

On top of it all, I also have a shelf of books with my name as author.

MOVING TOWARD A NEW PERIOD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

This miracle of being allowed to release so much pent-up work is impossible to describe, but it is fostering an incredible change within me. The publication of my novels as ebooks through Smashwords.com and the postings on this blog of so many bits from my archives are allowing me to enter a period of reduction – something I’m calling “decollecting,” when it comes to my books, recordings, manuscripts, extra clothing, and other assemblies. What I’m also finding is an opening to rethink almost everything and, like the layers of an onion being stripped away, of finding myself willing to rely on fewer and fewer answers … and more and more questions. Add to that a growing sense of wonder, in many cases, or of futility and cynicism, when looking at so many of the political and economic policies being followed blindly.

What I am accepting is that I require less and less material support. Maybe it’s the renunciation in my yogic past finally kicking in, or maybe it’s the tightened focus on what remains before me.

One thing I know as I view the trail markers before me: I’m not ready to kick back, for certain. Let’s see where this goes.

REGARDING ELK AND MORE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Monday morning, as I noted at the time:  

I’d thrown the kids off the PC, where they were watching an episode of The Simpsons, only to find out it was actually an assignment for the older one’s upper-level college course, the Sociology of Humor. [No joking.] And then I got around to some poetry submissions, including an acceptance or two.

Glad you like the work I sent. The elk poems arise out of the four years I spent in the desert of Washington state, bordering the “dry side” of the Cascade Range. They’re part of a series, most of which has already appeared in journals. I’m not a hunter, but living as I have most of my adult life in places near forest (even my time in Indiana and Iowa), I’ve had to acknowledge the existence of hunting as a fact of life – and the ways ancient hunting, with its religious/spiritual dimensions (the discipline of meditation, for instance, arises from waiting for the game), contrasts with modern “harvesting.” Even so, some editors have rejected the work out of hand – maybe they thought I’m a NRA member (quite the opposite, in reality – no guns for me).

Among the poems I’ve written are “After the Fact,” which comes out of Native American lore. It turns out that Gary Snyder also has a piece drawing on the same myth – “This Poem Is for Bear” – which acknowledges the aspect of the girl’s disrespecting the bruin before the abduction. I found another piece along this line of my work, “If a Man Goes Mad,” which works along a similar grain.

Finally, as I look back on the period, I reopen a longpoem, my American Olympus, based on a one-week camping trip with a now ex-wife and a former girlfriend who was visiting (who would have guessed they’d actually enjoy each other’s company). As it turns out, I still hear from the ex-girlfriend.

HOW DID THEY AFFORD IT?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

Viewing several documentaries on the writing life in Manhattan in the 1950s leaves me wondering just how anyone could afford it. Yes, the world was quite different then and, if we can believe their arguments, the written word was king the way it would no longer be by the late ’60s.

Still, it’s hard for me to believe that writing would have paid that much more in the era than it did when I entered the profession. How many plum magazine assignments were there, anyway? Or how many lucrative book advances?

The argument that rents were low, especially in Greenwich Village, is hard to believe for anyone who tried to find a decent place upstate in the early ’70s, as I did. Even for a full-time journalist working for Gannett, the best the pay would cover was a slum where a heavy rain would leak on my typewriter.

And that was without the heavy drinking that we’re told was required of the New York literary set, as well as the psychotherapy, sometimes daily. Plus the heavy smoking. Did I add, all the men wore suits and ties. (And all of the writers and editors, it was emphasized, were males. Women were employed as “fact checkers.”)

Still, when I run the numbers, they don’t add up. Can anyone tell me what I’m missing?