Back home in the PNW

After a long and exhausting 5-day drive across the country (Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington) with a 22-foot Uhaul truck and auto transporter in tow, Kort and I made it back to Seattle. In our final days, it really felt like Arkansas was conspiring to keep us there - from Wheaton moving falling through on us 24 hours before the pick-up of our belongings for move to contracting with a Uhaul agent who was unable to help up secure our car on the auto transporter. I seriously lost my mind more then once, and saw my partner do the same.

The good news is that we are here. We are renting a condo in Ballard, just three blocks from downtown Ballard on Market Street.

And the even better news is that I am writing again, after a long dry spell. As we were crossing through Fayetteville, and I saw signs for the "Aux Arcs" (Ozarks) - I realized what had been missing in the poetry manuscript that I just drafted together of poems produced in the last few years. The poems that are explicitly about the experience of living and working in Arkansas were absent. Unspoken. Topics that I was not able to approach for many reasons. So the book is no longer called "Six Persimmons" (after one of the poems in the collection) - its new name is "Aux Arcs" - the historical term for "of or at Arkansas" but also the "arc" or bend, as in a river, as in the trajectory of my life which took me into the Deep South for three years and away from the West Coast. It is the book in my oeuvre that is most definitively about a specific geography, as well as busting out of its tiny boundaries. The poems on food and animals will take a back seat to the new theme of self-exile and estrangement in Dixie. This is not to say that Arkansas was a complete and total bardo zone - we found a community of friends and collaborators inside and outside of our workplaces and made deep connections. But as a whole, I could not see myself giving birth to or raising children in small-town Arkansas. Coming back to Seattle was about choosing a specific community. And a life.

I also found a painting in the collections of Arkansas' Crystal Bridges Museum that is an appropriate representation of my experiences in the South - "The Island" by Walton Ford. It is an image of savagery and survival. Note: The breed of Tasmanian wolf depicted in the painting is now extinct.

So if you read this blog and are curious about the new writings that I am posting - they will reference the experiences of the last three years. The Osaka poem, Main Street, etc.