Here in Dallas until Sunday, the reading and workshop at Richland College went well and now a little time to relax. The weather is perfect at the mid-70s with plenty of sunshine.

I went to the most amazing art show that I have been to in I don't remember how long, yesterday at the Museum. Phil Collins has created a triptych video installation of karaoke singers from politically volatile countries singing Smiths songs! The installation is three huge adjoining rooms with life-size video projections of performers singing songs from the Smiths catalog. At any one time, the viewer can only see two screens at most. The rooms themselves have a viewing bench and room to dance, reminiscent of private karaoke performance rooms. I saw renditions of "You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby" and a slew of other songs, plus an instrumental interpretation of "Oscillate Wildly." The guy from S.E. Asia got brownie points for imperfect English and dancing like the Moz, pulling his shirt open wide. There's a catalog that accompanies this show which I picked up and hope to blog about more soon.

Gary Lawless at Gulf of Maine Books wrote the following on his blog :

Our friend and mentor Nanao Sakaki, the wandering Japanese poet, is now in his eighties, and has some serious health concerns. We are part of a support network raising money to fund his care. If you would like to help out, please send a donation of any size to:

Committee on Poetry Inc.
PO Box 582
Stuyvesant Station
New York City, NY 10009

Indicate on your donation that your donation is for the Nanao Sakaki fund.
Please include your complete name and address, as all donations to the fund are tax deductible.

Tomorrow in Dallas:

Shin Yu Pai at the Richland College Literary Festival.

Reading/slide show: 11 am - 12 noon; Fannin Hall 108
Writing workshop: 12 noon - 1 pm; Fannin Hall 108

Oscar redux

Fashion: What was that asymmetrical sack-like dress that Tilda Swinton was wearing? And what was that outfit that Diablo Cody was wearing? Tres Wilma Flintsone.

Hooray for Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard. And hooray to John Stewart for making the space for Marketa to say her thank yous.

Persepolis should have beat Ratatouille!

What was with John Stewart calling attention to pregnant women at the award show?

Katherine Heigl and Owen Wilson seemed to have a lot of trouble reading from the teleprompt.

I went to the book release reading for John Marshall's Meaning a Cloud at Open Books this afternoon. This was the first event that I ever attended at the store and it was a full house, standing room only with some of Seattle's best in attendance - Peter Pereira, Kathleen Flenniken, Sam Green, Paul Hunter and others. John's wife, Christine, the co-owner of Open Books, gave a loving introduction and presented John with a "Jimmy" award, a award based on the work of James Schuyler - Schuyler's photo emblazoning a bright yellow scotch container. John read excerpts from the three different sections that make up his book - the 1st section of poems deals with a life-altering car accident that affected the poet's life, the 2nd section was composed of poems about the polis, with the 3rd section about the decline and death of the poet's mother.

John's poems are direct and elegant in the simplicity of their language and imagery - careful and precise, there was much to learn from sitting in the audience and absorbing these precious poems. Listening to his poem about going to clean out his mother's room at the rest home and his encounter with another resident who asks him the same nonsensical question over and over again about whether or not a man he saw was his mother, and the poet realizing that instead of saying no that was not your mother, he might have said to this suffering stranger, I am your mother and I still love you.

Afterwards, a big reception at the Blue Star in Wallingford hosted by John - a wonderful gathering of community coming together to celebrate John's work as an author and a major force in the Seattle community. The publication of Meaning a Cloud was long overdue.

In doing some reading for class this week, I discovered that the town where I grew up was a sundown town. It makes me think about the racial climate in which my folks first arrived and tried to get established in this country. Riverside and the adjoining city of Redlands apparently expelled their entire Chinese population in 1893.

The Stranger ran a great article on originality and influence this week - of interest to all engaged in art-making.

Renga Update

Far-off deer cry
a whistling October ideogram
not found in the sutras

a script for simple living
the balm that wakens the world

he gestures angrily
at Dakshina Kali
creek crescent moon creek

knotting the tsutsumi cloth
before arriving at her home

he follows the black
throated jay with sad eyes
vague clouds icy ravines

painting in the pupil of daruma
wish for a smooth migration

on the hill-god masks
spooky silver eyes --
we bathe them in June

the freshly washed corpse with
flowers braided in his beard

lit with a blue sheen
where two granite rocks narrow
the rough creek

ruptures of earth, the shift
of fault lines, cleaving of loam

Kalidasa saw
sub-aquatic fires erupt from the
gods' love-making

Thanks to the editor of Ecotone online for publishing a piece from Adamantine.

The print edition of Rain Taxi has a new review by Lucas Klein of Nathaniel Tarn's book The Embattled Lyric. Lucas spends the first few paragraphs ruminating on the connections between anthropology and poetry.

I didn't take a lot of photos in New York. But here are a few:


John Keene and Chris Stackhouse read from their tour de force collection Seismosis.


I stopped in M&M World which was ablaze with light in Times Square. The whole store smells unnaturally of melted chocolate. The candies in these storage tubes are silver in hue.


This beautiful girl from Taiwan was in the subway. I took her picture. Later, I saw her at the escalator at AWP inside the Hilton, handing out flyers to a Chinese acrobat performance for Chinese New's Year at Radio City Music Hall.


There is much to contemplate at the Rubin Museum, including these lovely namkhas - also known as the "eye of god."


Some of the best stuff at the Rubin was not in the galleries, but in the educational areas. This was hung at a station for making prayer flags. The handwriting next to a drawing of a cat says, "May all felines large and small, fierce and gentle, be protected and loved."


Here's another.


Model of the temple at Bodh Gaya.

We're having an event for Letters to the World here in Seattle on Thursday, April 17, at 7:30 at the UW Women's Center in Cunningham Hall.

Featured readers are Susan Rich, Carol Levin, Neile Graham, Kelli Agodon, Lana Ayers, Jeanine Gailey, Julene Weaver, Martha Silano and me.

I think this event will mark the end of my organizing efforts for some time, unless something comes together at the SAM. It was great to see my Buddhist friends in New York at the Rubin. That program ran the way that I wish all poetry events should run - a beautiful space, a flawless sound system, a warm host, gracious readers, and an appreciative audience. Best to end on a high note.

Post-AWP, a poet wrote to ask my advice about artists for the cover of his forthcoming book. The request felt a little bit awkward - everyone has their own tastes and aesthetics and is an "expert" in their own tastes, if nothing else; a book has its own gestalt - choosing and/or designing cover art is, I think, one of the greater joys of indie publishing and a great opportunity to think outside the box of one's own poems. I have no advice to give in this area. I am no authority.

A few people have solicited me for new work lately. I don't have anything that I want to publish right now, other than the entire manuscript that is Adamantine. I'm not into "poetry debt" and am working out some new interests and directions in my writing. The jagged stylistic edges of Sightings is a thing of the past - I will probably never write that way again.

My friend Chip Livingston just released a new chapbook of poetry. Bid for a copy on ebay here. Gival Press will bring out Chip's full-length collection in 2010. Chip is one of the most gifted writers around. Snap up his chap before he gets completely famous.

I'm going to be giving a talk this spring at the Transforming Museums Conference at UW on Poetry and the Museum, using the Frye Museum, the Ulrich Museum, and the DMA as case studies of different ways in which art museums are putting together innovative poetry-related programming in collaboration with poets.

New year, new poem

Restoration

one year out from
surgery, the physician

finds pale halos
circling my retinas,

rings of white
keloid scars scoring

where laser carved
tissue, the enhancement

of cornea that I

might better discern
what’s at arm’s length

the cracks & fissures

marking the breaks
in an earthenware calix

fragments joined together
by lacquer, an artery

dusted in gold, see
what was fractured

made more precious
by virtue of its wound

Thanks to the Rubin Museum of Art for hosting the Buddhist poetry reading this past Saturday. The Rubin is a beautiful 6-story museum space in Manhatten with gorgeous exhibition spaces and education areas tucked into the various gallery areas. (Photos to come soon). Great photo exhibit on the 3rd floor of the Bhutanese landscape - Bhutan is the land of "GNH" and not GNP - "gross national happiness." Our group read in a spacious, first-class theatre with great sound and ambience. We had a turnout of about 40, which for a Saturday afternoon during AWP was terrific. We even had one audience member in attendance who had heard about the reading from the WOMPO list and came out. Our host at the Rubin closed out the event by offering each of the readers silk katas onstage - a beautiful gesture to close a powerful gathering of readers.

The rest of the AWP scene got me very down this year. A lot of hungry and aggressive energy set the general vibe within two blocks walking distance of the Hilton. Watching interactions between readers/fans and authors, the hunger for real or imagined "connection." I saw people that I'd known in Boulder, Chicago, Dallas, and Boston. There were people I avoided. Seeing a good friend swept up in his recent literary celebrity and wondering how our friendship will or won't withstand the change. Getting stood up. Getting dumped. And then standing a friend up and replicating bad behavior. Having a white friend candidly ask me b/c he felt "safe" doing so, in relation to the exhibition described below at the ICP, what "decolonizing" means. And knowing that it's only been through my work in anthropology these last two quarters that I could patiently answer that question, and then feeling at odds with myself for having to serve in that role (again). Realizing that I've become someone else too since leaving Dallas (and Boston and Boulder and Chicago - literally changing my name). That I have moved on. That I am grieving a certain loss, but that I am moving towards something that I have wanted for a long time, perhaps more than any falsely constructed sense of community - a wholeness of knowledge, both of the self and the intellect.

I went to two great exhibitions - the Kerouac show at the NYPL which displays the giant scroll that is On the Road. And the ICP which had lots of great stuff on display from its archives - a room of Mapplethorpe photos from the Black Book re-interpreted and decolonized through cultural and postcolonial theory by the artist Glenn Ligon, on display with Sherrie Levine's appropriations of Walker Evan's WPA project. Levine finally made sense to me in this light. Upstairs, some great work by Barbara Bloom - an installation with broken Chinese ceramics, made whole again by gold lacquer tracing the fractures.

Coming home to Kort who is healthy again, eating dinner at Kabul on SuperBowl Sunday then typing up the annotated biblio on Japan readings that I read on the plane. And Henry Louis Gates on "Signifyin(g)"! Understanding all that I have written in the past years as a poet through the lens of political theory and feeling that the best work, and the real work is yet to come.

I met some great people this weekend - among them John Keene, Evie Shockley, Pratibha Kelapure, and Tom Morgan, and saw some people that I was very happy to see again - Norbu Rick, Margaret Gibson and her husband David McKain, Brian Turner, Tyrone Williams, and Bruce Covey. Thanks to those for keeping it real.

Living with the Kombai

I stumbled across the Travel Channel last night which was airing back-to-back episodes of "Living with the Kombai" - the adventure of two white guys (a journalist and a non-fiction writer) living with the Kombai tribe of Papua New Guinea. This show has major echoes of Napoleon Chagnon and Bronislaw Malinowski. Part reality tv show, part travel diary, part half-assed ethnography and kinship study, I have to wonder how the anthropology community feels about this show. In last night's episode, a tribal woman needed medical intervention - her husband, the chief, claimed that she had "fallen on a stick" and hurt herself. In reality, he had shot her with a bow and arrow in the stomach during an argument. Sounds like the so-called "war-like" qualities of the Yanomamo. Witchcraft is also the subject of some discussion. The amateur ethnographers strip down for the ceremonial ritual, donning nothing but hollowed out yellow-orange squashes strategically placed over their penises...

La Petite Zine #21 is newly launched. Thanks to Rick for the InteReview.

Gleaners unite! Does anything like THIS exist in Seattle?