The Wages of Moonlight: A Bio of Sorts, An Upcoming Reading

Here's my take on the stale, old "artist's" questions I was asked to provide answers to for my upcoming livestream from the Green Kill Gallery in Kingston, NY, August 12 at 8:00 pm:

The Wages of Moonlight

I first saw myself around the age of four. We lived in the first floor of a house in Wyandanch. There was a broken-down pavilion in the yard that we were warned to stay away from. I drank the last drops of soda syrup from bottles waiting by the back door to be returned. 

I am compelled to recall the past in fits and starts. Like those drips of soda syrup, the past returns with some effort, and little welcome. 

The artist who comes back to me again and again these days is Anna Held. A brief flash in the early 1900s, her star was polished by Ziegfeld, but she was the one who shone. A powerful Jewish refugee who adopted the persona of a Parisian coquette, she died at 46 of a rare disorder we still have no cure for. 

I am supported by those ancient stars, paid to excess by the moon and her fickle appearances. Support comes first from within. If there is any applause about, enjoy it for what it is—the current phase of consent. 

In the last few months, convention as we know it has been upended. I long to return to that broken-down pavilion of the past, stepping carefully around floorboards that will bear no weight. I long for the trumpet vines and moonflowers that surely by now have created the only roof it ever needed. I long for the sweetness of soda syrup, dappled with impurities, from bottles beside the tin milk box. I long for the milkman and his shiny white slacks. 

Upon waking, I immediately miss the moon, no matter her demeanor of the night before. I rush to the bathroom, and am not ashamed of it. Any who pretend otherwise are invoking a false narrative. 

Art is a sign of society. Without it we are beasts, tearing our masks off in a crowded Walmart, lengthening the stay of immoral diseases by kisses of black dust. 

The act of creation offers me clarity, not intoxication. I am reassured that I am still connected to the segment of humanity that has both feet in the dirt and eyes in the stars.

To preregister, here's the link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-stream-august-12-8-pmmike-jurkovic-guy-reed-cheryl-a-rice-tickets-115417299249. I'll be reading with Guy Reed and Mike Jurkovic. The take will be split between the poets and the venue.

Poetry In A Time Of Pandemic

 

I had been on a roll since the new year began. I’ve been revising a collection of poems written in 2015, one for each month, to see if they might work as a chapbook. I just ordered a biography of Fanny Brice, one of the few Ziegfeld-related books I don’t have. Diving back into that sequence of poems is always on the list of projects. Other poems always come out in between.

As of yesterday, my employer was able to set my department up to work at home. The plan now is for two weeks, but since technology now allows us to take calls as home as well, that plan is all the more flexible. The season, which normally begins in May, has been pushed back to June. Even that is just an estimate at this point. A seasonal facility requires time to prepare the grounds, as well as hire and train the much-expanded staff. For now, my job still exists. My Beloved is still employed as well, but since his is a much more isolated situation, as long as the building’s open, he’ll be on site as usual.

I’m feeling grief, sorrow, fear. They come and go, rational and otherwise. I have my teary moments, especially alone, but thank goodness for social media, the perfect medium for social distancing in the friendliest way. Amazon might be out of powdered milk, but here at Casa Diva, there’s a Mabel Normand Film Festival on the schedule tonight, courtesy of Cladrite Radio (check them out!). I am a tireless stocker of basement shelves, so even if an actual food shortage arises, we will be good for a while.

Poetry has been the last thing on my mind in the last two weeks. Guy Reed and I had an interview scheduled for St. Patrick’s Day with Sharon Israel on WIOX in Roxbury, NY that I asked to be postponed, and all live readings are off, for the time being. I had no words to speak about what at the time seemed so minor, at times like these a vanity of sorts. A poem popped out first thing yesterday morning, though. Not a great poem, but a safe observational piece:

            Light

            Lights, lights all around

            until the sun rises up to do its duty,

            including the lamp beside the bed

            I’ve had since college,

            one on the dresser, crystal base,

            kept after a lover went South,

            back East, and I remained

            on the left side of the river.

            A wall sconce illuminates the stairs,

            and the freight train a few blocks off

            is the only traffic moving.

            The birds begin their Spring song of sex and hope,

            eggs for the season glad for the extra space

            tho their brains cannot compute why.

            The air is quieter, dearer,

            busses garaged, cars silent.

            Did the leap day give us twenty-four more hours

            to pretend, until the bulb in our heads went off?

            The light on my desk is on now.

            The computer revs its modest engine,

            eager for the day ahead of

            uncertain emails, calls from frightened customers

            whose yearly nirvana’s been postponed.

            Coffee won’t change things.

            Change isn’t in my power now,

            just awe at Creation pushing me towards

            another life, another reluctant sun. 

National Poetry Month 2019- Part III !

The month ended with a bang for me, if poetry readings can ever be described as having that effect. I was kindly asked to curate an hour of poetry at the Woodstock Library as part of their Saturday evening series. Although after forty-some odd years of writing I could easily fill the hour with my own musings, I decided instead to divide the time up between myself and three other poets I’ve grown to love and respect. And, instead of a reading of our own work, I asked them to select a poet or poets whose work had influenced theirs, and to share that poet’s work as well as a few selections that reflected that influence. 

The variety in the presentation was predictable, and yet wonderfully rich and surprising in its scope. Marianna Boncek, whom I’ve known since our days at SUNY New Paltz in the early ‘80s, read the work of her mother, Barbara Boncek, and her daughter, Rachel Sanborn. Both are poets of substance, and Barbara was one of the first “civilian” poets I encountered after graduation. The old Stone Ridge Poetry Society, which used to meet regularly at the Stone Ridge Library, was my Gateway Group for poetry endeavors in the real world. Luckily, Marianna included some of her own wonderful work, inspired by family as well as local history in many instances.

Michael Platsky, former host of the currently homeless Harmony poetry reading series, was another poet I encountered after college. He was a regular at the testosterone-riddled Tinker Street readings, and his piece about pissing on a bus tire in NYC as a boy beside Allen Ginsberg has lingered in my mind for years. Platsky, who is too humble about his own work, read instead the poems of the late, great Dan Propper, a former Woodstocker and accomplished poet of the past. I had a chance to hear Propper once or twice in my early poet days, and have the good fortune to possess a copy of a CD of him reading many of his greatest hits. Passing the torch is what Woodstock poets do best, and Platsky honored Propper in excellent form. 

My poetry companion Guy Reed, another one who is too humble for his own good, is a transplant from Minnesota, and the inspiration for My Minnesota Boyhood, my reimagining of his childhood on the prairie. In addition to being active on the local poetry scene for almost two decades, Reed has consistently sought inspiration and information from academic poets whenever possible. He read the works of three of his favorites: James Wright, the elder half of one of the few (if not only) father/son Pulitzer team, the recently passed Jack Gilbert, and the very much alive Marie Howe, whom he has studied with. Reed’s commitment to poetry, and his careful study of others’ work, has benefitted his own voice as well as my own. 

I had no choice, really, but to read some of the better-known poems from, if not my favorite poet these days, at least the poet I am most identified with publicly. From around 1992 to 2002, I was the host of the annual Sylvia Plath Bake-Off. It started as a catchy theme for a monthly reading I was hosting at the AIR Studio in Kingston, and soon morphed into a life of its own. Eventually, we attracted the attention of Pillsbury, who apparently owns the copyright to the phrase “Bake-Off.” This inspired me to add a baking contest to the already chaotic proceedings.

For those interested in more details, here’s a link to an account I authored for Plath Profiles, an academic publication devoted to, of course, all things Plath: 

http://www.angelfire.com/indie/airstudio/images/Rice.pdf.

But, more important for me these days is how far, and how close, I have come to Plath and her predicament. One of the many reasons the Bake-Off, with all its smarm and casual swagger, would no longer be possible for me is because I have lived through all the ages that Plath did, and then some. I have been an artist, a woman, a wife, and folks, the struggle is real, and continues to this day. I was never inclined to motherhood, and give her credit for the effort she put into those dual careers that women seem to believe they must carry in order to be judged at least equal to their male counterparts. Motherhood would have broken me. 

Motherhood may have been part of what broke Plath, but she was challenged from the beginning. What is a marvel is how much she accomplished in her short life. When I was the age she was at her death, I was starting another new chapter, moving to Albany, taking a shot at grad school to see if academia was where I belonged after all. It was not. Her work overall is excellent, although most of it weighed down with the visible labor of her efforts. Her final year, the poems she knew would “make” her reputation, burn with the fire of Lady Lazarus. In many ways there was nowhere for her to go from those heights. 

I don’t take her life, her death as lightly as I once did. Like the women in Romeo & Juliet, I have passed from being Juliet, to her mother, and rapidly approach the role of Nurse, laughing at the gravity, weeping at the innocence of passion. As I have aged, her life has revealed itself to me in all its complexities, as has my own. May we both rise, may we all rise.