Back - Home From Home - And Healing
This whole incident with The Poetry Foundation was just too much -- especially as I was right in the heat of it, cranking out these blog posts I've been holding off on posting to my own blog for the exposure (for others) they would get on the PF site. I was intending to send them all in before leaving for California in order to get my father's papers, his writings which I'll be editing. When the Poetry Foundation pulled the plug on my blog without as much as a sorry, and worse, shut me out of the site completely, I decided to get away & go to California after all. I needed to think about something else. This was not a good thing for a poet with an ulcer. It erupted saturday afternoon - the non-stop vomiting. I spent the whole trip sick (with the exception of a trip to Keppler's books in Palo Alto, my old old time favorite) and alone in my hotel room. Too sick to call family or friends, at the mercy of maids and room service menus. Not good. Today I feel weak and had to stop about every 5 feet walking to class. Not good.
I did have a revelation. I decided to call the book: Ganesh's Tusk: Towards A Pedagogy of Poetics. Bryce Milligan at Wings Press has already given a verbal acceptance for it's publication.
That was good.
Good too, what little time spent with an old dear friend, amistad poetica - apt to cure anything.
Here's what I bought at Kepler's: (It was HARD deciding - I was on a budget.) (And, no, they did not have my book.) (And, no, I'm not really the type of person to say anything about it.) (sigh)
Dreaming of the End of War - Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A Hunger - Lucie Brock-Broido
Ants On the Melon - Virginia Hamilton Adair (she has a poem to me!)
Crush - Richard Siken (finally!)
Lampblack & Ash - Simone Muench (YEA! My former student! Finally!)
House With the Blue Bed - Alfred Arteaga (Finally!)
The latter I hope to have signed by the author himself on Sept. 26 at a benefit to help pay for the experimental stem cell heart treatments Alfred is receiving - and which are keeping him alive. More on this benefit with Naomi Quiñonez and others in San Francisco.
Just the thought of that, makes me feel all better. Soon I'll b eatin' up tigers -- paper and otherwise. Chow.
I did have a revelation. I decided to call the book: Ganesh's Tusk: Towards A Pedagogy of Poetics. Bryce Milligan at Wings Press has already given a verbal acceptance for it's publication.
That was good.
Good too, what little time spent with an old dear friend, amistad poetica - apt to cure anything.
Here's what I bought at Kepler's: (It was HARD deciding - I was on a budget.) (And, no, they did not have my book.) (And, no, I'm not really the type of person to say anything about it.) (sigh)
Dreaming of the End of War - Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A Hunger - Lucie Brock-Broido
Ants On the Melon - Virginia Hamilton Adair (she has a poem to me!)
Crush - Richard Siken (finally!)
Lampblack & Ash - Simone Muench (YEA! My former student! Finally!)
House With the Blue Bed - Alfred Arteaga (Finally!)
The latter I hope to have signed by the author himself on Sept. 26 at a benefit to help pay for the experimental stem cell heart treatments Alfred is receiving - and which are keeping him alive. More on this benefit with Naomi Quiñonez and others in San Francisco.
Just the thought of that, makes me feel all better. Soon I'll b eatin' up tigers -- paper and otherwise. Chow.
posted by Lorna Dee Cervantes at 5:55 PM
4 Comments:
Quite intense. I hope you're feeling up to the tigers, soon. And posting more often. :)
Lorna. Sorry to hear you were put-out sick by the event.
Siken's book-very, very, good.
And Lucie BB's book has to be a book I read over & over. Truly a book that keeps me in its heart.
Hope you enjoy them.
Lorna,--
good wishes for something like R & R. Must say, Ganesh's Tusk: Towards A Pedagogy of Poetics is a startling, evocative title. For anyone familiar with the iconography (I know the story but frankly am clueless about its symbology), it at once calls up interesting questions about "making a mark" (in the instance, on the face of the moon -- by the tusk broken off and hurled by that el primo scrivener). Can't wait to read what you've to say. When you say "the book," I presume you mean a book of yours (? rather than, say, of your father's papers)...
bests,
d.i.
ps -- in the above, I was thinking of versions of Ganesha mythology that have him throwing his broken-off tusk at the moon (origin of the mark that in the West is called "the man in the moon"). However I've stumbled on another version: " ...it is said that Ganesha broke off one of his tusks and used it to finish writing the Mahabharata. " . . . As I recall, he was the scribe, while the poet Vyasa was the writer per se; but one rule of their agreement was: yes Ganesha would write down all the words the poet recited; but he would also have to comprehend them. So sometimes, if the poet wanted to get a bit of a breather (to think ahead about what he was writing, say), he would throw in a more complex syntactic construction. The scribe would then need to linger in pondering over it before he was ready to write the next verse. Thus the poet got some respite (for I guess another rule was, he had to keep extemporizing the work without any break). (This is evidently a traditional explanation for why the epic-poem has certain more ornate, complex verses here and there.)
At any rate, your use of the imagery vis-a-vis poetics is to be awaited.
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