"Unconscious Mutterings #208 On 1/30/07"

1. Limit :: is the nation's way, that cross-tongued


2. Voice :: shackled at the ass, that voter's


3. Change :: and that grab lack box: boned


4. Expression :: of freedom. Take it to your


5. Tailor :: Have or fancy a skeleton of chad.


6. Lemonade :: on a dismal day, the forgetting


7. Thought :: exquisite and manufactured. Phoney


8. Phoebe :: Fighting men of pause. The lax


9. Impression :: on the wax. The dying


10. Sister :: of art. The slackened noose. The blood. Letting.

* Carve out the caves of your echoes with subliminal leaping at La Luna Niña's

"Unconscious Mutterings #207 On 1/30/07"

1. Audition :: all you want, the winter's here,


2. Urgent :: in its blanket of snuff, the world's


3. Lunch :: pungent and moral, the base


4. Adult :: magnified and plush. This ardent


5. Mug :: and the bliss from the lip compels that


6. Awful :: rowing toward word. The animated


7. Comics :: of our lives, all the overgrown


8. Damage :: Fait complis; the duly shattered. Overcome


9. Kicks :: and the world dances with you.


10. Experience :: the simple, the give and sake, and witness.

* Be there in the flame, burn your own bluest, monitor the range at La Luna Niña's kitchen.

Como Abejas

"I feel inside a hive of bees, the calm before the swarm. It's all good, as the kids say. Change is the only constant, as Heraclitus said, so may as well make it a positive one, on the side of growth and Light" (and that's my take on divorce, too)

Hay(na)ku For January 27, 2007 - Global Peace March

Hay(na)ku for January 27, 2007


Freedom
Raises voices;
Justice's loving MARCH!

Happy Birthday, Kelly Dougall!

I miss you.

--------
And, happy birthday to one of my favorite po' bloggers, the best I found last year, Alison Stine -- who's now Alison Davis, having married fellow writer, Jordan Davis: congratulations, Ali! I didn't realize you'd married. That's great! (Jordan: Smart move!)

One More Meme For the New Old Year

the year-end roundup

1. What did you do in 2006 that you'd never done before?
Boycotted Christmas.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I'm more into resolving than making resolutions. Last year I kept the same resolutions I made the year before which was the first year I ever made them: to have more sex and to stop procrastinating. I like 'em. I'm still getting around to the latter. Also, to not be so isolated, so I've been trying to be more available to friends and family.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Not that I recall -- but then I'm terrible that way.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Yes.

5. What countries did you visit?
none -- although i feel good about keeping the jet fuel out of the air

6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?
The Big L

7. What date from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
My birthday. It's my birthday.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Drive was officially published on January 1, 2006.

9. What was your biggest failure?
The Big L.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Few bouts with flu. A few folks who turn my stomach.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Poetry books. Maybe yours.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Mine, considering those few folks mentioned above.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
A few folks. The U.S. government and its arsenal.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Food and folly -- travel.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
My book coming out, and the readings from it. My father's retrospective show in San Francisco. The fact that I have five more books of poetry ready to go. My new novel.

16. What songs will always remind you of 2006?
Maná - "Combatiente"

17. Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
Both.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Socialize. Hike. Stroke Yemaya.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Procrastinate. Wish.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
I boycotted and fasted for three days.

20. How will you be spending New Year's?
Stayed home. I'd like to be dancing to my brother's band next one -- and pausing to kiss.

22. Did you fall in love in 2006?
Yes and no.

23. How many one-night stands?
zero.

24. What was your favorite TV program?
Ugly Betty -- just because.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Nah, I'm not a hater, even of those few folk who make me throw up.

26. What was the best book you read?
Hard one. It always seems to be the last -- which in this case was Ted Hughes's "Birthday Letters" to Sylvia. I milked this one all year, reading it almost a poem at a time, then in one long bathtub soak session where I just immersed myself in their imagined life together and without.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Manu Chao

28. What did you want and got?
Bose headphones -- thanks T!

29. What did you want and not get?
The deed to my half of the house.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?
I didn't see any :-(

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
52. I read with my old friend Maurice Kenny in an all-skins reading in San Francisco Intersection for the Arts. It was great.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
None of your business. (Did I say, "Love?")

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!

34. What kept you sane?
My "personal fashion concept": hahahahahahahahahahahaha.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Pig actors or acting piggies or hog performers, which ever you prefer. And, does anyone else think the sensitive metrosexual caveman on those stupid commercials is hot? Or is it just me?

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
WAR.

37. Who did you miss?
You know. And the one I haven't met yet.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Why is this so hard? I feel like I'm forgetting someone important. I know I met some fantastic new people this last year. And, reconnecting with my old friend, Naomi Quiñonez was the best.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006.
Who knows? I don't know. You never know. And that's all I know. You know?

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
John Mayer: "And that's the way this wheel keeps workin' now

You can't love too much one part of it.
You can't love too much one part of it.
You can't love..."

I just noticed that Jessica tagged me on this meme last week while I was getting ready for classes to start. Now, I tag AD, Eduardo and Diana, Ernesto in cold London and you.

Birdie On That Frustrating, Inscrutable, Convoluted Thing That Just Might Save Your Life

"Some women share this same knowledge, this deep pitch of ink against digital skin. They write their lives through connected words, through the art called Poetry. They know intimately that strange truth I discovered after half a life of pushing it far from me - that words carry more than meaning. They are water, they are essential."

Read more here: Lorna Dee Cervantes and others featured on Birdie Jaworski's post on BlogHer.org on poetry and women poetry bloggers.

Birdie's a poet I really like a lot; her imagery is always breath-taking and poignant, and she has a great sense of 'the poem" within a piece of writing -- I always appreciate the way she chisels it. She's both brilliant and a natural.

Check out the links to other women po' bloggers such as Barbara Jane Bermeo (nee Reyes) as well as the other featured po'bloggers such as Pris Campbell. Thanks, Birdie! I think it's so fine to be mentioned on BlogHer, an org I highly respect. Maybe I can make their conference this summer in Chicago. And, maybe I'll see you there.

Short List of Books I Loaned to Intermediate Poetry Workshop Students

It doesn't make sense to me to make a class full of poets read the same poem by the same poet at the same time. You have to hand somebody a poet at the right moment, when they need it. I lose a lot of books this way, but gain, I think, some good poems in return that may not have ever been written without discovering the right poem and poet at the right time. All of my intermediate poetry workshop students are required to read at least one book of poetry every two weeks. I not only recommend books, as do others in the workshop, I put books in their hands and they can take it with them and read it -- and return it. The books are their choice, including the ones I recommend. This is not a list of the best. It's a record of what was available at the time for one particular person at one moment in time. Each book was carefully chosen for each student, usually in groups of 2 or 3 at a time. I like thinking, for example, that whomever I loaned the copy of Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us got the same copy of a book I lent out to Simone Muensch 15 years ago. This list is way incomplete as some I put back on my shelves in the office a while ago. There's about another 30 books and poets I didn't get back this year: Sikelianos, Dubiago, Saul Williams, Linda Hogan, more Harjo, Cisneros, all my Hass except for one, more Saner, Bob Kaufman, my copy of The Outlaw Bible, all of my Dugan, all my Kinnell, all my Hopkins, the rest of Gregg, the rest of Creeley ... this is getting sad. If this is you -- hey! Good time to get in touch. You can return my books (now with increased literary/historical value for the collection of my papers I'm gathering for Stanford) to me at CUB 226; English Department; University of Colorado; Boulder, CO 80309-0226. Mostly, I miss their faces -- and yours.


------------------------------------------
Books Lent Out to Intermediate Poetry Workshop students in 2006 (not counting the books I didn't get back):


Alexie, Sherman - The Summer of Black Widows

Baca, Jimmy Santiago - What's Happening
- Immigrants In Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems
- Black Mesa Poems
- Set This Book On Fire
- Martîn and Meditations on the South Valley
- C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans

Bishop, Elizabeth - Complete Poems

Broumas, Olga - Beginning With O

Carruth, Hayden - Shorter Poems

Cassells, Cyrus - Soul Make A Path Through Shouting
- Beautiful Signor

Catacalos, Rosemary - Again For the First Time

Creeley, Robert - A Quick Graph
- The Island
- The Gold Diggers and Other Stories

Crow, Mary - I Have Tasted the Apple

Cruz, Victor Hernandez - Snaps
- The Low Writing

H.D. - Selected
- Trilogy

Daniels, Jim - M-80

Dougherty, Sean - ?
- audio tape

Dickinson, Emily - Complete Poems

Erdrich, Louise - Baptism of Desire

Equi, Elaine - Decoy

Forche, Carolyn - The Country Between Us

Gander, Forrest - Deeds of the Utmost Kindness

Gillan, Maria Mazziotti - Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems

Ginsberg, Allen - Mind Breaths
- Kaddish and Other Poems
- Reality Sandwiches
- Planet News
- Howl and other Poems
- The Gates of Wrath
- Empty Mirror (Early Poems)
- The Fall of America

Goldbarth, Albert - Marriage and Other Science Fiction

Gregg, Linda - Chosen By the Lion

Harjo, Joy - The Woman Who Fell From the Sky

Hass, Robert - Field Guide

Hirshfield, Jane - Of Gravity and Angels
- The October Palace

Jeffers, Robinson - The Women of Point Sur & Other Poems
- The Double Axe
- Dear Judas
- Selected Poems

Levertov, Denise - The Poet In the World

Levine, Philip - Selected Poems

Martinez, Demetria - Breathing Between the Lines

McHugh, Heather - Dangerous
- Hinge and Sign

Miller, Jane - Memory at These Speeds

Olds, Sharon - The Unswept Room

Patchen, Kenneth - Love Poems
- Complete Poems

Piercy, Marge - Early Girl
- Mars and Her Children
- Available Light
- The Art of Blessing the Day
- Breaking Camp
- Living In the Open
- What Are Girls Made Of?

Pinsky, Robert - One Word
- Jersey Rain

Rich, Adrienne - Dark Fields of the Republic

Saner, Reg - So This Is the Map

Schneberg, Willa - In the Margins of the World

Simon, John Oliver - Lord of the Dawn

Sleigh, Tom - Waking

Swenson, Kay - Landlady of Bangkok

Wakoski, Diane - Dancing On the Grave of a Son of A Bitch
- Smudging

Waldman, Anne - Iovis
- That Roman Thing

Wright, Charles - ?

Wright, James - Two Citizens
- This Journey

Zweig, Paul - Eternity's Woods

Why Blog?

As the sitemeter slides past 60,000 blog visits

Birdie asks, "Why blog?"

I blog to push through the plug of prose, that clot in the lower vertebrae of the soul between the inner eye and the third planet from the mind. I blog to open the doors I hide behind whenever someone knocks on the real. I blog to answer the phone. I blog to always be home. I blog for the dead -- literally. They like it. They like to see their names written in electrons of light, shooting out of the dark or slowly blinking in this self-made sky. I blog to remind. I blog to recommend. I blog to revel. I blog to reveal the bald spot on top of God's head. I blog to call out the goddesses. I blog for the goddesses of documentation. I blog because I lose my calendars even on a good day. I blog like the ocean comes in on waves. I blog like delivering hot meals to shut-ins. I blog to not be a shut-in. I blog to sing, "Yo soy!" I blog because I am misrepresented, misquoted, misunderstood and missed -- often. I blog to set the record straight. I blog because it's never straight and there's never any record. I blog to record. I blog because I can. I blog, because, I am. I blog because I can't sing worth a dam.

1/17/07
for BlogHer.org

Help Tia Chucha's Cafe & Centro Cultural - Luis Rodriguez Event Center Forced to Close 2/17

Tia Chucha's Cafe to Close--How you can help

Help our community- repost repost!
Foward this and send to as many of your friends as possible. We want to make sure all this info is ALL OVER myspace. [and your blogs]

Tia Chucha's Cafe and Centro Cultural are asking for your support on our myspace campaign.

How you can help:

1) Post bulletins and send messages with Tia Chucha's Statement on whats going on.

2) Convince people to change their profile picture to the Support Tia Chucha's Saturday February 17, 2007 picture.

3) Promote the anniversary by posting the flyer on people's pages, as well as sending out bulletins.

4) Help promote all of our events and workshops. This is our last month and we need to make sure all the events have great turn outs. The workshops will continue after we close at an interim space to be announced at the anniversary.

All you have to do is cut and paste any of the following:



Tia Chucha's Statement:

Tia Chucha's must move--but our Spirit, Creativity, and Unity are intact
Just after the holidays, Tia Chucha's Cafe & Cultural Center was served with a notice forcing us to move. We have to leave by February 28, 2007. A powerfully energized and thriving bookstore/cafe/performance space/cultural center is to be replaced by high-tech laundry machines. The laundry company is apparently investing $8 million in the strip mall, something we can't compete with.
Maintain a vibrant community space? Of course not! Instead, make way for another laundry outlet! That's capitalism. Money follows money, not needs, not literacy, not community, or cultural expression. In the world we've inherited, most creativity and expression has to make big money, or it's out.


We created a space that requires a lot of personal and community investment. The community came to embrace Tia Chucha's and make this space its own. We plan to take the spirit, creativity, and unity we helped nurture to a temporary site as we plan and prepare to obtain a larger permanent site in the Northeast San Fernando Valley .
This is a time to come together, strategize, and work to keep Tia Chucha's viable as a cultural center while we explore our options. We will not give up. We will find a temporary space; we will also curtail our retail operations while we concentrate on our programming, events, outreach, fundraising, and growth.


We ask that you strengthen our efforts and sign this petition in support of Tia Chucha's coming back stronger, bigger, and better endowed than ever. We need this written support to show the various developers; city, county, and state agencies; and foundations that this community will fight for the arts, music, dance, theater, writing, film, publishing, and a vital gathering place where we can share ideas, history, politics, economics, and our indigenous traditions and thinking.
Our strategy this year includes implementing a fundraising plan with a 5th Anniversary event at Tia Chucha's on February 17 . We will also have another "Celebrating Words: Written, Performed & Sung" festival at Sylmar Park on May 19 . And we have been approved to do a benefit event for Tia Chucha's at the Ford Amphitheater in Hollywood on July 29. Sign up for our e-mail newsletter here on our website up at the top, or call 818-362-7060 for more information.


--Luis J. Rodriguez Co-founder and Creative Director, Tia Chucha's Cafe & Centro Cultural
How You Can Help!!! *Come into the cafe and sign the petition!!! *Attend a community meeting held at Pacoima Beautiful located at 11243 Glenoaks Blvd., Suite 1 Pacoima, CA 91331 on Wednesday, January 17@ 12 noon. Voice your opinion and let the city of Pacoima know that you support Tia Chucha's and request that they consider us as a prospective bussiness for the new shopping center being built on Paxton St. on the old Price Pfister Factory site. *Volunteer!!! We will need assistance at our Anniversary Celebration and with the transition to our new temporary space. Interested volunteers can email Tia Chucha's at chuchamail@aol.com or call (818)362-7060 and ask how you can help!!! *Donate and re-invest in your community!!! Donations like yours will assist Tia Chucha's in it's struggle and continued survival!!!




Tia Chucha's Cafe Cultural
email: info@tiachucha.com
phone: (818)362-7060
web: http://www.tiachucha.com

"Unconscious Mutterings #206 On 1/17/07"

1. Episode :: Seven where the crow stalks the girl. Consider the


2. Source ::, the tail lain sideways, the subtle


3. Jerk :: and snag. The yellow mouth. Let me


4. Introduce :: you. Two to a heart-beat. Rivet it well,


5. Ralph :: Be solvent in the plying touch.


6. Stare :: back into autumn, when the sun


7. Cast :: its own shadow and eclipse was only a


8. Scenario :: for light. For long time, love, a wicked


9. Flu :: you stood in bed for, and love, that


10. Mad :: cow of deliverance kept right on keepin' on.

* Be your own welder, smelt the ore of your dreams at the Subliminal Luna Niña.

"Unconscious Mutterings #205 On 1/17/07"

1. Incomplete :: pocket in the left ventricle.


2. Bobby :: sucks it out into a silver spoon. One fine


3. Chopstick :: at the left of the plate. Some wry


4. Trauma :: outside, some fate to the head. Some


5. Hesitate :: and turn too late, the odd-ball


6. Leap :: into destiny, clearly something else.


7. Magnify :: and the world grows with you. Yards and


8. Yards :: of still shots on the reel: my


9. Alexander :: and your Fanny Mae. Discover the other side,


10. Fracture :: the slate, the slay, your life.

* Beam up to the other side, be the wall you hit at La Luna Niña

The Wind Was Ringing My Doorbell

... the other day -- that's how hard it was sweeping down the Flatirons and onto my porch. I swear I could hear the nails creaking in the roof as it blew. Hurricane strength gusts, enough to blow a bread truck over. Kinda fun. Good to have nowhere to go. Yesterday I watched yet another blizzard move slowly in. The storm crept in on jaguar's claws, not little cat's feet. I watched it in mass move over the mountains and down like a giant white eraser turning everything into a cartoon, a drawing, an icy etching. Not much snow yet but bitter cold. The world asserting herself. So much for going to San Francisco. I think of the fog rolling down the mountains near Pulgas from the Pacific -- Pacific fog, only frozen. Now I can't see the next street over and all is the same color as the frost on the branches: the world reduced to it's undersides. I remember how I dreamed myself into this landscape, first coming here in order to rewrite my dreams by changing their 'scape. Now I'm like a book I read myself into -- I think I'll light the fireplace, look out.

I've been under the weather in this weather, spending a lot of time in bed and sleeping away my dreaming; some kind of stomach flu -- could be my ulcer back; I've been doing a lot of thinking.

There was a life I once crafted for myself, one of self-sustenance and ground -- grounding. By accident I find the place I always wanted as a girl dreaming of the woman I would become, a simple place, but a life I wasn't rich enough to live without a partner for the work and the road and the knowing. Odd to find such a huge chunk of me, not discarded, but like something that stays in the drawer because there's never a good time to use it or it's useless without the match. This, getting snowed in, this lifesap asserting itself through the creaking layers -- the trickle through the acequia still sustaining the heart of the river puts it in my mind's hand, something I'd forgotten I wanted: a beautiful place beside a painted mesa, to find myself in the fossils and colored stones in a river, the red earth, the rock and the rolling river within its moods. I kept thinking of Kunitz's poem, the one of living in the layers and the one that ends: "I must change my life."


Acequia



I always wanted
that New Mexican sky,
that strap of land between the rio
and acequia, the sun-sanded
land and the man behind the hand,
the strands of my hair going nowhere,
fixed in the sight of that painted
beauty, hum-struck, a quiver
in a hive of bees. Days alive, they dance,
heartfull, dichoso, the plucked pollen,
the illumination from the river rising
in all of their eyes. They. The field and bosques
alive and intertwined. The wings, still.


1/7/07

And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills...

...and I'm gettin' older, too. So.



Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
I don't know.

Currently working on a collection of love poems - 250 pages. (!) Back to it...

Mag Poem.4 "Day Dance Beside Peach"

Mag Poem.4/Day Dance Beside Peach



Be there. Drink when full rhythm brings
motor-play, that meager carnival of solitary
tingle. Love: this wet song murmuring yet
bound remembering the anatomy of your blossom
everything -- a brilliant stone tiny from speaking
about heart and skin, a summer staggering, a sound-
scent vein of rose and puddle, cool mud down under
matter. Through sizzle night -- paradise, an imagined
wait, a ricochet garden in orange cocktails
of moon: our immense slathering to life, to soil,
for the flop of thought, wicked drip, prison sun.
Not me, you, sea, ecstatic machine like a black
boot in livid storm. I come full as red, as never.
Want to hear it rain?



1/1/07

"Unconscious Mutterings #204 On 1/3/07"

1. Resolution :: in the silver afterglow, a photograph:


2. Happy :: heartwood in the burl of self,


3. Bubbly :: and cool as creek, a hidden


4. Kiss :: and the end to weathering wood


5. Leather :: and spice, nice whittled glances.


6. Fancy :: that and freedom rings to call, slick


7. Pages :: of desire and place, all the wit


8. Stupid :: sages bubbling up with age.


9. Apologize :: and demand - more sugar, more settled


10. Secrets :: and the way of light, of shadow, of you. Remind.

* Be your own buzz, love your own honey at La Luna Nina.

"Unconscious Mutterings #203 On 1/3/07"

1. Terrify :: the old ways with the new


2. Month :: of the huge remembering


3. Throat :: in the heart of hope


4. Invasion :: of the body senses


5. Nail :: and hammer in the head


6. 12 :: to 9, and 10 to 1 you


7. Bicker :: among yourselves: saintly


8. Thomas :: and gloomy Gus the twin


9. Sibling :: s to the masks of fate


10. Delude :: and deny, deluge and delight - the new

* Harvest your own husks and weave your own doll subliminally.