Dispatch from Seattle

I *heart* Seattle. Arrived on Saturday night and was picked up at the airport by a poet and teacher who holds the world's record time for running across the floor of the Grand Canyon and specializes in running up and down mountains. My hosts are a poet/Alexander technique teacher and her husband, a pilot and master woodworker specializing in art deco and craftmen's style furniture. The classes at U of W were engaging and interesting - both the grad students and their research. The junior faculty were infinitely likeable. I felt overwhelmed on campus between the throngs of young students and signing financial aid paperwork. The bus system is highly navigable and user friendly. There is a plethora of creative staffing agencies with hook-ups to Microsoft and small and national agencies. The room in the house where I am staying overlooks the Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountain range. In the Sound there is a platform where sea lions hang out until they migrate to Mexico in winter. At night, their barking is as comforting as tree frogs or crickets. This is the first place where I have actually been able to see myself living. The housing and rental prices are totally inflated, but I am crazy about this place.

Upcoming readings:

Saturday, April 28 at the Burning Word Fest on Whidbey Island
Monday, April 30 at Evergreen College with Charles Alexander and Glenn Mott
Tuesday, May 1 at the Hugo House

On the move again

Sitting at Newark airport on a long layover, waiting for my flight to Seattle. Pleasantly surprised that both BDL and Newark have free wi-fi....

Last night's reading at the ALL Gallery was awesome. I wish I had taken pictures. Suzanne was a gracious hostess in a well-lit and intimate gallery space in what appeared to be the loft district which is in some heavy transition. We had a full house, with audience members who came all the way from New York and Providence to hear Rick. Rick was a rock star - he read about 20 minutes worth of materials spanning love poems, poems about his children, poems set in the Mojave desert, and poems integrating the visual arts into their narratives. His introductions to the poems were precise and engaging (not rambling like mine!) and he read with a confidence and presence that reminded me of hearing Mark Doty read. ALL recorded the event and eventually a podcast should be available here. I followed with a reading from SIGHTINGS and some of the new material that I worked on a Soul Mountain, closing with the Autumn Nijuin Renga that I wrote with Andrew Schelling, voiced together by Rick and me. The ALL is a great venue for anyone looking to readings in the Northeast. There was a contingent of audience members from the Yale community, and the readers in the open mic were quite good. The acoustics of the gallery were good, and it was an intimate and friendly space, reminiscent to me of alternative art spaces in Chicago.

The sun is finally out on the E. Coast, post nor'easter. I arrive in Seattle tonight just past 9 if all goes well. Then teaching tomorrow at the Seattle Poetry Festival, which has been in full swing since Friday. The emerald city - I have been waiting to see Seattle for almost 14 years - I have almost ended up going to school in the Puget Sound on at least 3 occasions. I'm not sure why the region calls to me or what it holds except new possibilities for being and creativity.

Word of Mouth

WORD OF MOUTH, the monthly reading series at ARTS + LITERATURE LABORATORY welcomes Shin Yu Pai & Rick Benjamin Friday, April 20 at 7 p.m.

SHIN YU PAI is the author of Sightings: Selected Writings 2000-2005 (1913 Press), The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz, 2006), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed), 2005), Equivalence, (La Alameda, 2003), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books, 1998). Two titles, Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks) and Nutritional Feed (Tupelo Press) are forthcoming. Her poems are anthologized in America Zen: A Gathering of Poets (Bottom Dog Press) and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (Wisdom Publications).

RICK BENJAMIN is a poet and teacher who lives in Providence, Rhode Island. He teaches poetry and community practice at Brown University and RISD & also works in the non-profit sector at the Rhode Island Service Alliance. His poems have appeared in Watershed, Blackletter, the Journal of New Jersey Poets, the Patterson Poetry Review, the Berkeley Poetry Review and Creature Comforts, among other places. He is also the father of eleven year-old twin sons and a ten year old daughter, who consistently creep into his poetry.

An open mic will end the evening. For more information, please visit the website at www.allgallery.org or call 203-671-5175.

I am shocked and saddened by yesterday's shootings at Virginia Tech. Reports speculate that the shooter was an Asian male, possibly Chinese. Angry Asian Man has more on it here. In the mean time, people like Senator McCain are sticking by their opinion that guns should be available to all law-abiding citizens as a Constitutional right. I've been thinking lately about my dissertation research for U of W about teenage adolescent shut-ins and mental health in Japan. These sorts of mass gun-related massacres in that country are unheard of, as very very few people own guns. If you want to kill someone, you have to actually touch that person which makes it very personal and human. I think too about the recent shooting at U of W, where a woman was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. In that case, the person was coming from outside of the academic environment and enacting that violence. But I begin to think about the relationship between Japanese hikkikomori and their shut-in behaviors in contrast to the violence that we see in American culture manifested through shootings at Columbine, University of Texas, middle schools, etc. Are the causes similar? Are the cultures just dealing with social pressure and total alienation in very different ways? How does the phenomenon of hikkikomori become then even more relevant to the study of cultural difference and similarity?

Chris Lacass, Penelope Pelizzon, Marilyn Nelson, Chip Livingston and Susan Letcher.

Lots of comings and goings at Soul Mountain these last few days. On Saturday, the retreat hosted a day of silence and a nice sit-down dinner for several UCONN writers. A new resident from NY arrived yesterday. The energy in the house keeps changing which makes writing a little tougher, amplified by the power outages from storms. Four more days of writing and then to New Haven for a reading at the ALL Gallery. And then out to Seattle to see what the city has to offer.

This residency has been different from the others I've done (minus Taipei Artist Village) in that residents prepare their own meals, and we're literally housed together in one big house with a telephone and wi-fi. It's taught me something about integrating a daily practice with a home life and fitting in cooking and laundry and exercising and all the other distractions/priorities. Like this might not be so impossible to recreate....

coincident

the old healer dies
weeks after giving me
a picture of Jesus

& taking the blue-
green stone of my
ancestral burden

hand it over, she said

though I’m far
from Christian, I kept
the grainy xeroxed

copy, a photo
of snowcapped alps,
the image of Christ

in shadowed relief,
maybe she was ready
to slip away so

quietly just like that
& it wasn’t the crushing
weight of hungry ghosts

or family curses

cool hand luke

       for Santi Vitayaudom

a grown man
remembers being
a boy of seven

quaking at
the mere mention
of water, his mind

filled with the chime
of ice cream
truck & bicycle

the parched dry of
his own mouth –
an acculturated taste

for water drawn straight
from the tap, a cloud
of slow-rising bubbles

brimming liquid
clarifies until
reaching transparency

a hyper-extended arm &
your father’s teaching:
hold up this glass

w/out over-
turning a drop, & you
can focus on anything

spring peepers, summer flowering


invisible singers

                     awaken from winter

              slumber under logs,

                                     loose bark

at the edge                                             of bodies


                  of water

                                     sounding courtship songs

                            seasonal as the night-blooming cereus

my father and I

                             share a memory of

                                    staying awake to witness

                                                      the white queen flower
                  
in the backyard

                                    just once before withering

evergreen

stick after stick
our marriage bamboo
withers, handwritten

wishes slipping
into stink water,

I trim back roots,
& place near light

sponge-like mold
claiming yet another
yellow-mottled victim

rehydrate w/ filtered
water, replant
evergreen grafts

we always knew
I wasn’t born w/
a natural talent

for nurturing plants,
turn to yarrow
stalks, and sage

advice of i-ching

the unchanging
ground of being,
divining solid

lines unbreaking

practice

Pema Norbu Gompo
shares with me a story:
at reaching thirty

thousand prostrations,
glancing into the vanity
to see a trimmed down

waist w/out love
handles – starting over

from zero, more than
once to better
polish his intent

a personal practice:
carving holes in
poetry books w/
exacto blade & straight
edge, intervention as
a design concept

a hole too uneven
a hole too big
a hole too ragged
a hole too small

every event a mirror
of mind & heart,
imperfect despite
a template for success,
but isn't there
just this work?

heaps of words piling
on my writing desk
day after day

Postcards to Phillip Barnhart

I.

un petit Parisian
adventure in the days

before the war,
love less like
Rick & Ilsa

– & more like
Jane & Paul

II.

barzakh
the Arabs call
“the isthmus between,”

two bodies meeting,
as different waters in
the ocean do,

each part stays
separate, holding
its essence


III.

along for the ride

an impromptu trip
across state lines

to taste the unknown,
hamburgers grown

where grass is greener,

the rental car ran
low on gas – only

enough fuel to get
us half the way home

– we’ll always have Cheyenne

in a borrowed car
we could travel together

no further than that

I've been keeping a casual eye on the SPD website for the last 2 weeks or so. Their upgraded website has a nice function for authors and publishers that tells you the exact number of current books in stock for a given title. A couple of weeks ago, SPD was stocked with 37 copies of Sightings. Now it's down to 10! This is good news, though I suspect that book orders are coming in primarily from those who work stocking bookstores and/or the DMA gift store in Dallas where I'll read and sign books in May. Still, it means that books are moving....

Body Worlds

sideshow with science
at best, grosses over

a billion worldwide
Van Hagen’s signature

brands the base
of a woman on bent knee

releasing a dense red cloud
of doves back into flight

skin pulled from flesh
to fashion angel wings

the goalkeeper blocks
a soccer ball with one

hand, shows off internal
organs with the other,

dappled grey of smoker’s
lung, or just industrial air

pollution? A man parts
the horse’s mane in

the second sequence
of tai-chi, hip &

knee joints replaced
with steel, corpses

stolen from mental hospitals
the undocumented bodies

of the executed, bullet holes
found in a specimen’s head-

quartered in Dalian & Krygystan

the humanity
of bodies stripped

of skin, fatty tissue,
age & eye color

the body sliced in two, Hirst’s
“mother & child divided,”

chain-sawed parts & not a whole
or was it “two fucking & two watching”

all sensation washed
out of the New York

show, preparing a cross-
-section, Von Hagen’s wife

flattens a rolling pin
over what was once

a length of human.
In the educational model

of the body’s burden
I feel the pounding of

my own enlarged heart.

I had a deep sense last night thinking about this current poetry manuscript that it will be the last full-length book of poems that I write for awhile. I am totally ok with that, given all the big changes on the horizon. All the more reason to take more emotional risks in these new poems....

search and recovery

           for James Kim (1971 – 2006)

it could have
happened to any
of us

a wrong turn
down a logging road
tires tunneled
into snow

a man’s undying
love for his children

moves satellites
maps aerial images

18 care packages
dropped over 16
miles of the Siskiyou,

bearing handwritten
notes from a father
to his son

the signs
you left for those
who came after you

a red t-shirt
a wool sock,
a child’s blue skirt

layers of a life,
stripped down to
a family’s fate –

the weight of being
unseen – to travel a
path back

to what you knew
at birth, the warmth
of being held close

brought home

the green i-pod
my husband bought
for my retreat

in Old Lyme
sits on the shelf
during nature walks,

that I might hear
the sound a tick makes
right before it bites

double happiness*

the tallest man in the world
reaches into the gullet of
an ailing dolphin to retrieve
undigested bits of plastic

human hands more
sensitive than any
man-made instrument
of surgical precision

after 55 years
of wifelessness,
his mother in the ground
marriage circulars dispatched to
the far corners of the earth,

to choose a bride
from Chifeng
a man’s hometown
what’s nearest to
the human heart

a boy separated
from his parents
on the streets of Pusan
grows up on the slopes
of Vail to win

bronze at Turin, prizing
more dearly than Olympic
victory – the journey of

reaching outward to find
a way back home to
this body, this birth

father, this motherland


*on the occasion of Bao Xishun’s wedding and Kim Bong-seok’s reunion with his father

Weekends always seem to be a bit of a wash in terms of getting focused writing done. So I've been watching movies - Black Orpheus (great soundtrack with compositions by Louis Bonfa) and Babel. Our host at the residency took us all to Easter brunch yesterday followed by a quick tour of the I-Park residency which is 5 miles down the road in E. Haddam. I-Park is on about 450 acres of wooded land with water. Beautiful and a little eerie. From what I understand of the project's vision - the owner pictures a memorial sculpture park where cremains could be interred in a secular setting open to all. It even has a little development near a large lake called Thanatopolis. Seems like a great model to look at for this project in progress could be the Forest Hills Cemetery in J.P. Boston - their connections to contemporary public art and outdoor sculpture enhanced by ongoing educational tours, coupled with public programs such as Harris Gardner's poetry-in-the-chapel reading series, and the annual lantern lighting festival during the summer.... The I-Park residency no longer apparently accepts writers into the program apparently - too high needs?!

hands rubbing / sticks / rubbing mind /


                   against breath / sparking heat / steam


drying rags / in distant caves / the body


                   generates / its own internal / agni /


melting through / this finish /


                   the engaged heart / already a flame / set afire

Daruma

on the unmarked oval
face of the blind sage
sketch a single eye &
draw in the rest
when the journey
is over

feeding hour

ten
thousand
crows

dot
the tops
of leafless trees

at dusk
a black cloud
gathers, slowly

to blot out all light

birdbrain

lighting a stick of incense,
I turn off the music of people
on the porch outside

each day at 4, Canada
geese make water landings
in the swimming hole out back

I watch the pond grass
migrate to the edges
of the water’s surface

try to listen to what
is in my own head

the ear a bony labyrinth
shared by ancient birds & men

yet air moves better
through a bird

traveling through pockets
of internal anatomy

a flap-assisted gliding technique

if I was blinded
in my youth
like Lusseyran,

human lie detector
for the Resistance,

could I then better detect
the lumps in my own language

patterns knotted as
lactic acid built up
in the body

this morning I look down
and notice my toes – withered
& twice my age

if I am dying,
then read to me
from the Tibetan Book of Death,

replaying
the honk of geese
before they touch water.

Gilded Edge Reading

Chip Livingston


Sarah Nelson

The view from Soul Mountain

... or more specifically from my bedroom window. It's raining today and the cleaning woman came. Five minutes ago, I heard the honking of Canadian geese and watched a pair make a water landing in the swimming hole opposite my view. Second day in a row I've seen such simple wonders.

la quinta del sordo

in the villa
of the deaf man
14 frescoes
painted al secco
after near-death
experience,
the silence of
a sectarian chapel
hung with coal dark
triptychs & panels
the rectangle
of an exit hole
cut away into
blackness

Process notes

Thinking of these recent short abstract poems I have been writing for Steven's paintings, the writing process becomes like scatting - instinctual improvs on motifs within his work. Short lines within the poems driven by Steven's own quick process for "drawing" (pouring) ink into form, no painting taking more than 5-minutes to draw to a close.

What the end manuscript will be called and aspire to:

Structure of the inner ear

caldera

bubble bubble toil
                                    & trouble
rural towns
                          reduced

to rubble

ruptured crust

belches gas & ash
                   
tephra of lava
                       bombs

shattering matter

National Poetry Month reading at The Gilded Edge Gallery tomorrow for the Soul Mountain residents. My co-residents/readers are MFA student Sara Nelson from U Madison/Wisconsin and prose writer/poet/chef Chip Livingston who I saw read prose back in 1997 at a 3x3 reading for Naropa, CU, and DU. Even back then, his work dazzled!

Texas twister

the emergence of
comic-book hero
brought on by
tornado attack
& assault by
nuclear particles
before turning to
the light taking up
with the Sandman
& Medusa hair-
trigger false hand
extended in fellowship
finding that both
twister & flytrap
share the intuition to kill

migration

unanchoring
the plant body
in cloud forest
walking palms
throw out
stilt roots
etablishing
new paths
to let the old
ways die

Caracol

archaeological relics
of Mayan ritual:

Pachychilus

uncoiling

gleaming mucus

trails miniature

spiral jetty

a jute snail’s

capacity for

associative learning