The Rumors Are Slightly Exaggerated...

          

          Was it May when I last posted? So much time has passed, blog-wise. Part of me is compelled to try and catch up all at once. Another part of me just wants to leave a short note today, letting those I don’t always see a lot of that I am in fact still in the Poetry Game. And so I am.

            I’ve been lucky enough to have been invited to read in several new venues in 2017, including my first college gig, at Dutchess County Community College in Poughkeepsie. I got to meet some great students and faculty, and to hear more of Anton Yakovlev and Janet Hamill. I offered my services to a local arts “organization” in the form of a series of four free poetry workshops for the community. They were poorly attended and even more poorly publicized. I helped to represent Calling All Poets at a book fair at the Catskill Center in Phoenicia this summer, and got a pretty good sunburn to show for it. All in the name of supporting the arts.

            After the ugly events of November, 2016, I promised myself that I’d start walking the Liberal walk, and do more volunteer work in my community. I looked for opportunities that I was suited to, language and communications. My first effort was to train to be an English language tutor, but the group in charge was disorganized and delusional. I was assigned a learner who’d been in the program for too many years, and was clearly looking more for friends than skills. My only success so far in volunteering has been the single night I found time to help out at the Rosendale Theater, a longstanding tradition now in a new phase, that of local theater and movie house.

            All this angst, plus the necessary day job, leaves me with limited time to write, but I do. Early morning is best, when energy and inspiration allow. I’ve set the memoir aside for now, at least physically. It’s always brewing like a tiny black cauldron at the back of my head, but for now, I’ll let it bubble. With all the information I’ve crammed into my head in fifty-five years about the Ziegfeld Follies, I decided to just dive in and rough out some poems. At last count I have twenty-five pages of poems based on one of the least marketable of topics, but it’s poetry, and so beyond any Capitalist leanings it’s not even remotely amusing. It’s for me. And perhaps a neat handful of equally distracted Nostalgists. Hail the Interwebs!

            In mid-November, I was once again the featured reader at Harmony in Woodstock, a last-minute offering I’m glad now I accepted. The restaurant is likely to close early in 2018, and the series may or may not find a new home. To read in Woodstock for me is to come full circle, in a way. After college, after my divorce, the readings at the Tinker Street Café hosted by Dean Schambach (passed away just a month ago) were the real beginnings for me of my life as a post-graduate poet. I don’t believe that, outside of New York City, the same numerous opportunities exist for poets, and it was just luck, just a happy accident that I’ve ended up making my life here in the Hudson Valley. My work has grown, and been fed by so many I’ve met here. There is a richness inside that I could never have imagined for my life, a comradery I didn’t think was possible for a writer.

            The year has had its losses too, in addition to the loss of America’s dignity overseas. Several health issues have made life difficult for those around us. A couple have died too young. I am feeling unsettled, unambitious, confused as to what my priorities as an artist, as a woman, as a citizen might be. The clock ticks. My knees ache. My eyes close by 10:00 p.m., and the morning brings a thousand demands all before work begins at 9:00 a.m. Even now, I might try to get dishes done before I lay down to read a page before sleep. And the poems do come, when you least require them, and they find their place among all this life’s ephemera. I’d like to think I’ll have things in order when the time comes to drop this body, all projects completed, all papers in order. But in truth, when I’m gone, I don’t think whatever might be next will have any inclination to be concerned. 

          And there is a new granddaughter. 

**Poem: "Your Service"

Your Service

Tatters of dinette chairs flap in the Gulf breeze.

Like an island’s backside,

suburban bungalow, pink with sun,

private side of conches and radishes.

Owner and occupant, survivor,

outlives wife, sister, lives

to tell the story again and again

of barbaric Japs on a Pacific

island, two week mission

drawn out over months,

long beyond strategy,

mired in rote maneuver, headless

torsos, rotting wounded,

military brass losing interest.

The old man, then nineteen,

lost there whatever youth he had

coming to him.

He borrowed a watch from

one of the corpses

as a souvenir, inherits it back

when his mother dies, naturally,

of Camels and a broken heart.

Almost too late, an interviewer

asks all about it. The old man,

fingers on the kitchen faucet,

tells about the battle, details

he laughed around for decades.

At work, he managed a theater,

another water spectacular

where the stage revolved,

spun on the ocean like a

top of dreams.

Guy Lombardo, loyal Canadian,

led the band afterwards

under the tent, under the stars,

and the Schaefer flowed.

The old man writes a book

about going back to Brooklyn,

visiting his dead buddy’s family,

describing to them the quiet death

he didn’t have,

sparing them details

no civilian could bear.

The book stirs a little interest,

Hollywood consults, documentary

cameos, but it doesn’t last.

There are too many stories in this world

for our innocent audience to

linger long over one. The old man

sinks into the archives, where his war

is one of thousands.

He still keeps a neat house,

pool cemented over, dolphins

parading the canal two shows a day.

The sun pounds the sofa.

Pink carpet fades where

windows have their way.

We watch a DVD where he

and others tell their stories,

for once backed up by

newly found footage,

military cameras sent to

record victory, instead see

butchered bodies, men dancing

hysterics, lost in deranged performance.

The old man remarks,

“What do the kids say now?

‘Thanks for your service’?”

I nod, no better response

than that well-meaning,

knee jerk platitude suggested

by a lollipop media that still can’t

grasp the depth of the experience.

If service is productive, meaningful,

something built where there was less,

then his time in Pacific was a service.

Did he intend to serve his country?

Only propaganda films,

patriotic melodramas aim that high.

Leaving the stickball, the pretty girls

behind in the wild youth of Brooklyn,

he enlisted, hoping for a better time

than those that waited to be drafted.

What he got was gore no film could capture.

What he got was a watch whose time

had stopped in Peleliu,

gears ground to a solid halt

decades before.

CAR 3/7/16

Process to Text: Janet Hamill, Cheryl A. Rice and Anton Yakovlev

 

   On March 2, 2017, I'll be reading at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY with two amazing poets, in a series curated by Anne Gorrick and  Melanie Klein entitled, "Process to Text."  The reading begins at 7:00 pm, and will be held in the Washington Art Gallery on campus. Here are the details on my co-features:

JANET HAMILL is the author of seven books of poetry and short fiction: Troublante, The Temple, Nostalgia of the Infinite, Lost Ceilings, Body of Water, Tales from the Eternal Café and Knock. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize and Tales from the Eternal Café, was named one of the “Best Books of 2014” by Publishers Weekly. Her most recent book Knock, (Spuyten Duyvil Press, Brooklyn, NY, 2016) is a surreal trip book written in the form of 72 pantoums. In addition to writing, Janet performs with the band Lost Ceilings. Together they have released two CD’s of poetry and music– Flying Nowhere and Genie of the Alphabet. She’s taught at Naropa University and New England College, where she received her MFA. At present she is a senior artist advisor at the Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf, NY where she co-directs Megaphone Megaphone– a monthly series of workshops, readings and presentations focusing on surrealism’s literary origins, its predecessor and legacy.

 ANTON YAKOVLEV was born in Moscow, Russia and moved to the United States when he was 15. He studied filmmaking and poetry at Harvard University. He is the author of poetry chapbooks Ordinary Impalers (Aldrich Press, 2017), The Ghost of Grant Wood (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and Neptune Court (The Operating System, 2015). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Hopkins Review, Prelude, Measure, Amarillo Bay, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and elsewhere. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he was a finalist for the 2016 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and the winner of the 2016 KGB Poetry Annual Open-Mic Contest. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Esenin, is forthcoming from Sensitive Skin Books in 2017. He is a co-host of the Carmine Street Metrics reading series and of the Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow reading series, and, starting in January 2017, Education Director at the Bowery Poetry Club. He has also written and directed several short films.

     I'm thrilled to be on the bill with these two. Admission is free. DCCC is located at 53 Pendell Road in Poughkeepsie. Hope to see some of you there!