Going back for the plants

Well I've moved the books and papers, cleaned out all the file drawers (except for the pencils and staplers and stuff that was there when I moved in) (I have my own stapler, a beautiful sleek vintage model that I really ought to photograph, just to show you what a classic stapler can look like), recycled another armload of magazines, and it's down to one final box of take-home books and a few office plants. We'll swing by with the truck on Saturday to pick them up.

I'm trying to decide about Bob's chair: a big, blocky green armchair that swallows you so completely it practically belches. It was in Bob Taylor's office for years, a space I was glad to inherit for a while; when I gave it up last spring and moved to O'Leary, I had the green chair sent over. It looks like a great reading chair. I've never had time to relax in it. Maybe one final try: I'll see if it fits next to my file cabinet. I may have to swap it out for a proper bookcase. Though now that I consider this option, I realize I'd rather have a good, comfy chair than an extra bookcase: after all, I'm only going to use this office two days a week, and only for the fall semester. I should be bringing more books home, not stacking them in a cozy but temporary office.

* * * * *

Woke with a headache and the realization that R was right: I should have filled my new headache prescription so I'd have it on hand at the earliest onset of symptoms. Still, the medication (once I went over and got it) seems to be putting up a valiant battle (the war imagery is a total bleedover from reading HP7, and don't tell me, dammit, I've less than 80 pages to go!)

* * * * *

One of the plants I did bring home from my office a few weeks ago is a night-blooming cereus. It had grown topheavy in its plastic (faux terra cotta) pot and had taken to tipping over whenever the soil got a bit dry--this was, like, last year--so I plopped a nice fist-sized river stone (granite I think, nicely egg-shaped) in there to counterbalance the tippiness. The whole thing needed repotting. I put it out on the patio table for a couple weeks, figuring it needed light but not too much sun (patio umbrella), and this evening I repotted it into a heavy white glazed planter. Looks great. Hope it blooms; it's been years (back in Houston, in fact) since I've had one that bloomed (that plant died the next winter when I forgot to put it in the garage; the one I have now has grown from a tiny leaf cutting).

I should have taken a photo of this plant to show you what I'm talking about. Long, flat, straplike leaves; kind of a messy, haphhazard groing habit; absolutely stunning flowers when it finally decides to bloom: they start out as tiny buds and grow and grow until they are nearly the size of a fist, kind of shaggy looking. The flower opens at night (back in Houston, I would go out with a flashlight to watch) and you can literally watch the needlelike white petals tremble and part as it swells open. Next morning, it's spent, collapsed: a one-night-only affair.

* * * * *

R gave me a haircut. (Thanks, hon.) Reason #99 why I'm glad I married him. (Reason #98 was the incredible chicken bulgogi he cooked the other night.)

* * * * *

[photo: Worlds End Falls, July 2006--can't believe it's been a year]

New keys

Well the attic office remodel wasn't showing any signs of progress, so yesterday I received keys to a basement office in Taylor Hall, sorta halfway downstairs from the Bucknell Press offices. Nice space--big desk--filing cabinet--no windows and hmm, no bookcases. I'd been loading my books into copy paper boxes (having saved a few all semester); did you know (I didn't until yesterday) that five boxes full of poetry books will fit into three filing cabinet drawers?

We had an extra bookshelf at home, one of those nifty fold-down numbers, stored under the bed, so I took that in today. It will do until I can see about getting a proper bookcase.

Tomorrow: moving the last of my files and backing up the computer. I'll be using my laptop at the new office until the PC is relocated . . .
! ! !

I think those 5 are supposed to be spiders. I'm still reading HP7, late at night before falling asleep, which means I am staying up much too late to read in bed. I'm about 500 pages in. I'm terribly excited to see who dies next.
* * *

Just read a beautiful chapbook of prose poems, Give Up by Andrew Michael Roberts. Go to the Tarpulin Sky website and buy this book.
* * *

Three weeks left until the Keystone Chapbook competition closes. Submissions are coming in almost daily now. Thanks to everyone who's spreading the word.
* * *

Bedtime.

Oh, hindsight

[Several months ago, while R & I were browsing a flea market, I found a January 1945 copy of Reader's Digest and bought it for the following article. For all the times you might have wondered "What were they thinking?" with regard to kudzu (and other invasive species), well, here's what they were thinking.]

A Japanese ornamental vine is making exciting news in the South:

Kudzu- Another Agricultural Miracle

Condensed from Country Book Magazine

Russell Lord*

It was a hill farm in Alabama. If ever a farm were visibly dying, this one was. All of the topsoil had gone to the creeks and the sea. The field on which we stood was so gullied you had to keep jumping to get across it. The land was worn and bare, the sagging house was empty. But if you looked closely, here and there in the gullies you could see ropelike vines crawling, hugging the ground, beginning to net it down. It was the first planting of kudzu, the new cover crop, that I had ever seen.

"A man hanged himself in that house, and the bank took over the place. Now this field will heal soon and make fine pasture. It will be green next spring," my companion, R. Y. Bailey said. "Kudzu" Bailey, they called him. It was in December of 1936. Only a few shared Bailey's faith in this Japanese vine as a field crop, and not a few were afraid that it would be a more menacing pest than honeysuckle, spreading to take over the entire countryside.

Bailey and a few other believers replied that when a plant grows like honeysuckle yet feeds like clover or alfalfa, with approximately the same protein and carotene content, there was no point in being cautious. They showed that kudzu not only wove a mat of protective cover but worked as a legume to draw free nitrogen from the air and store it for plant use in the soil. So kudzu plantings kept marching on to heal slashed land and great gullies.

Last June I spent a week-end at the Georgia farm of Channing Cope, an influential kudzu grower. Cope says kudzu was brought in from Japan as an ornamental vine. He planted his first field of it in 1927, when he acquired 700 acres of run-down land near Covington, 30 miles from Atlanta. Yellow River Farm, it was called, for the river that drained it was yellow with topsoil.

Today the whole place stands out as a green oasis amid gray-brown cottoned-down country. "Cotton isn't king here any more," Channing Cope says happily. "Kudzu is king!" Livestock multiply in the meadows; the soil is held secure; the place is making money.

We stood that blazing hot Sunday at the edge of a marvelous vineland. The kudzu had made a riotous growth, hip deep, all over the hill.

"Reach down," said Channing. The ground was as damp and cool as that of a deeply shaded forest floor. "They took some temperatures over at the Experiment Station on a day like this," said Channing. "Bare ground was 140 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface. Under kudzu the ground temperature was only 89 degrees. That's something to consider. Many soil men here in the South wonder if the fierce heat on the tilled fields doesn't hurt the soil and hinder humidification.

"And just look at this kudzu duff!" He scooped up a handful. Those big, delicate leaves, shed from last year's crop, make a flaky mold that covers the ground completely and enters as organic matter to lighten topsoil fast. The cover on that field felt like a deep mattress under your feet.

Kudzu stands drought well. Some roots go 12 feet deep. Each crown puts out from one to four vines, and new crowns form in the joints and nodes. Five hundred crowns will plant an acre--about one crown to every 85 square feet. On rich soil the vines may grow 12 inches a day at the peak of the growing season, and 100 feet of growth in a year is not unknown. Even the first year's yield may be considerable, but it usually takes three years for the crop to take full possession of the acreage. Kudzu may be pastured or cut with a mower and taken as hay. "This 35 acres will make at least 3 1/2 tons of hay to the acre this year, drought or not," Cope told me.

I do not think that I ever saw a more erosible soil anywhere than on this farm. It washes like sugar. Even a cart track through new grassland will start a gully. But once Kudzu has taken hold thoroughly, the trouble ends. That solid mat holds the soil.

Hugh H. Bennett, Chief of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, said recently: "What, short of a miracle, can you call this plant? Kudzu has forced our Service to revise our appraisal of a lot of severely eroded land as having been ruined for further agricultural use. And it is not only a crop for gouged-out land; it is a splendid crop fro good land, too. It will cover a cornfield in one year; the next spring or early summer it can be plowed and that land planted to corn; then after the last cultivation of the corn it will again spread over the field, stop the erosion, store more nitrogen, and at the first hard frost lay down a carpet of rich leaf litter at least the equal of forest litter. All this in one year!"

Northern farmers are beginning to envy the South in having this marvel. Geneticists are now working to develop hardier strains that will push the kudzu belt northward. The general range of the crop is south of the Potomac River, although in my home county of Harford, Maryland, I have seen a growth as luxuriant as any.

In a part of the country farmed almost to death under the old crop-and-chop system, kudzu is lively, hopeful, exciting. "A strange ecstasy," Cope says, "lifts southern growers' hearts and exalts their language when they get together to praise kudzu." At a meeting of the Kudzu Club of America in Atlanta last spring one man told me how he raised eggs for three cents a dozen on kudzu hen pasture; others testified that corn yields had risen from fourfold to sevenfold on fields that had been in kudzu. One man told of his progress in dehydrating kudzu for stock feed and human use. It makes fine breakfast food, he said.

The Kudzu Club has set as its goal a million acres of kudzu in Georgia by 1950 and eight million acres for the South as a whole. "That wouldn't be a bit too much to support the livestock economy we need, and help make our agriculture permanent," Channing Cope says.

*RUSSELL LORD has written about farming for more than 20 years and is a consultant to the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Even as a boy of 13, he found agriculture on a Maryland farm so exciting that he began to report farmers' doings for a country weekly. At Cornell University he specialized in agriculture, and later he became a contributing editor of The Country Home, Country Life and The Progressive Farmer. He edits The Land, published by Friends of the Land, a nonprofit society formed four years ago to combat the alarming waste of our natural resources, and is author of Behold Our Land, The Agrarian Revival, and To Hold This Soil.

Saying too much: private moments in public poems

I've been thinking about this subject since I first started writing the poems that eventually were published in Survivable World: how much narrative detail is too much? After the book came out--after, in fact, I'd read one poem in particular in DC--, I realized that I'd gone too far with one line.

The poem is about the trips that I made to and from the hospital in D's last days, with and without his family. The phrase "everyone strained, polite" pushes right at the edge (I think now) of what's publicly acceptable: these are his family; they were under terrible stress, and I was only able to see them through my own lens of grief.

Which is acceptable in such circumstances, but for the fact that I wrote it down, fully intending to use it. I published it, thinking I had written an honest narrative of the experience. The thing I said next, and how I strained against the boundaries of privacy and propriety in order to accomplish the telling, is what shames me still. I want to say that I didn't mean it ("after ten years you'd think we'd know whether we liked one another"), that of course I liked them ("But you're just like any other married couple!" his mother said to D in her kitchen on one of our early visits), but they unnerved me, too.

The Pod People, I called them, that Christmas holiday our Honda's transmission failed on the long drive home to Houston. We were trying to push the car in terrible snow, and a beat-up white truck full of ominously quiet men picked us up, took us to a gas station miles down the road, where we phoned D's parents. Oh, the men were fine; it was just D's prissiness at the dirty truck--or maybe that they'd caught on that we were queers--or some undefined sense of difference that I'll never figure out which caused them to grow silent as we bumped along, but I couldn't help feeling that D was betraying a sense of disdain. I couldn't put my finger on it, but there was a palpable shift in the cab of that truck (why did I blame D for it?) and I remember thinking They could kill us, shove us down an embankment, go back for the car (absolutely loaded with gifts and camera equipment). It was days later, when D hadn't yet phoned to have the Honda towed, that I lost my patience with our extended visit, with living among his too-polite, blandly nice family, and launched into that explosive argument. I wanted to go home: I needed space to write, to read. I didn't trust their goodness and felt it had to be a facade; worse, I was sure they secretly disapproved of me.

And so the poem contains a kind of lie, though even as I write this I am back in that awkward shuttling to the hospital, the oppressibly religious funeral which I permitted because I knew it would comfort his parents. And yet, when his father, back at the house, said what a nice service it had been, didn't F murmur I thought it was awful, and didn't I realize that she, too, was somehow an outsider?

* * * * *

I made a fiction of my love,

and fell in love with that.

HP7

Randy and I walked up to the local wee bookshop a few minutes before midnight; there were maybe 25 people already lined up to buy the new Harry Potter. I waited outside, watched folks arrive (several kids in costume) and depart, gleefully clutching their copies.

I just finished Chapter 5. Let us not speak of it.

Happy reading, everyone.

Tagged

Okay, I'll play. Nels tagged me for the eight things meme, and though I'm panicked about which eight people to send this on to (flashbacks of dodgeball team selection back in high school gym class) (oh wait, *I* get to pick?), I'll try just about anything once. Here goes--

THE RULES

(We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.)
-Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
-People who are tagged write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
-At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. (Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.)

THE FACTS

1) I used to collect porcelain wall pockets, though I've since gotten rid of all but three. One of the three I can't part with looks like a teapot-shaped clock. It's light blue, and the hands are set at 7:20.
1A) (significance of the fact:) My late partner, David, passed at exactly 7:20 PM, about six years after we bought this wall pocket.
2) I have never broken a bone, though I do have an interesting scar on my scalp, left by a deep gash caused by a childhood fall against a case of Pepsi bottles.
2A) (I'm not going to do this for each one, but...) My mother worked in a general store when I was a child (she also worked as a waitress). Soda, back in the day, came in tall 16-oz. bottles and was delivered by the hunky Pepsi Man in painted wooden crates . . . This particular scar is so deep that it still freaks me out when I touch it with my fingertip.
3) I once shot my brother in the back of the head with a bow and arrow. Accidentally.
4) I am one of six children, but I only speak to three of my siblings. I got fed up with the crazy shit the other two kept pulling, took my toys and stomped out of that sandbox for good.
5) I was voted Most Likely to Succeed by my high school class, but I have never had the nerve to go to a reunion and tell them that I'm not tenured.
6) I was taught to read and write by a family friend (the owner of the general store referenced in 2A) long before I ever started public school. Because of this, everyone treated me as if I were a super-bright kid, and I believed them, despite later evidence to the contrary. (I'm maybe medium-bright, but I have a terrible memory for details.)
7) I have had three body piercings, not counting the ones in my ears.
8) I have no interest in getting a PhD, but I would love to go back and get an MFA in Book Arts.

THE TAGGING

1) Randy
2) Amanda
3) Eduardo
4) Collin
5) Peter
6) Dustin
7) I really have to stop here. I feel like a telemarketer. I don't really even *know* some of these people (though I'd like to). Apologies for wrenching the system. . .

[photo: wall pocket]

I'm not a designer, but . . .

What do you think of this pattern? It's a piece of fabric that dates back to the mid-1870s. I want to use it in a cover design for a chapbook.

Koestenbaum

I'm packing books in earnest now, and stopped to re-read this poem, which I'd tagged with a Post-It note and read last year to my students. When Jason (Schneiderman) and Michael (Broder) had me out to read at the Ear Inn a couple years ago, I had the pleasure of reading with Wayne Koestenbaum. I thoroughly enjoy his work. This poem's a little quieter; of course in class we talk about the lovely haunting imagery as well as the formal structure:

The Ornate and Lovely Corner House

Oldsmobiles up and down the canals all night:
how they drive on water
is a mystery beautiful as it is absolute.
I ask the waiter

the origin of the automobile riding
by the fishmonger’s,
idling on the water’s surface, and he is surprised
to see me linger

over a question that to him is obvious.
When I finish my coffee
the night-prowling cars have vanished,
but from my balcony

tonight, in the ornate and lovely corner
house, with envy
I will watch the slow procession of the cars
that are too heavy

to float. And yet they float, a formation
not reflected
in tomorrow’s papers, my generation’s
tone, the tormented

air I am used to hearing in the daily speeches.
The sublime
visits me so rarely that when it approaches
there is no time

to regret my lack of preparation
for its luminous
arrival, its liquid organization.
This life is formless

and I do not understand most of it:
why no children
gather in my cool garden when the heat
grows violent.

- Wayne Koestenbaum, Ode to Anna Moffo

[photo: mini violet blooming on my desk]

Thinking of a friend

Thinking of a friend, and the difficult passages we dread but can't avoid. This poem by Jody Gladding has been on my mind all weekend, and goes out to Nels:

Footwork

When Nijinsky died, they cut open his feet
to find the secret of his dance. His bones,

it turns out, were like anyone’s.
With each step, our heels sink that much

deeper into earth. We have
nowhere else to go. Once my mother

crossed and recrossed an entire field
to find my sandal. Now she’s gone;

she left her darning.

: Jody Gladding, Stone Crop

[photo: seedhead, 6/23/07]

New blue mini

Here's the new mini quilt. I finished binding it last night, washed it in the kitchen sink, and hung it up to dry. Tried taking photos this afternoon by pinning the quilt to a towel on the clothesline, but it was pretty breezy, so it may look a bit off square.

My mother hand-pieced the triangle squares and handed it off to me; I machine-pieced the border and hand-quilted the whole thing, then applied a very narrow binding made from the same border fabric. The quilt measures 14.5 inches tall x 18 inches wide.

* * * * *

We saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix this afternoon at the Campus Theatre: I loved it. That's all I'm gonna say.

* * * * *

Uhh, I don't think so

So I'm supposed to be packing up to move from my office and into a newly-renovated space on the third floor of Carnegie, where I had an office before I schlepped everything over to this building last summer. Are ya with me? On Monday, I walked over to check out the new digs. The photo pretty much says it all. Fortunately, the department manager in Geology is being super nice and has extended my stay until August 1, but I don't see how they're going to have the new space ready by then. Do you? So I'll have to move somewhere for the interim, then again when the office is finally ready. It's appalling.

* * * * *

The headache turned out to be a migraine, and eventually went away. My doc prescribed Midrin. We'll see how it fends off the next one (which hopefully won't occur anytime soon).

* * * * *

We need a nice slow rain.

* * * * *

Interest in the Keystone Chapbook Prize has been steady. (Thanks to Steve Herb at the PA Center for the Book for posting the CFS there!) The deadline is one month away (August 17), so if you're eligible, get that manuscript together!

* * * * *

Sorting through papers in my office (and at home). I've recycled pounds and pounds of paper. I must learn to be more efficient, especially given how often I've had to move offices. . .

New bars top

I have a rotten headache. This is the second day. I feel like someone has beaten me with a two-by-four.

* * * * *

Yesterday I pieced a new quilt top. This "Bars" top is made from reproductions of 19th century fabrics: the "poison green" original that the above is based on dates to 1850 and is commonly found in central PA quilts from the mid- to late 1800s. The double pink is one of my favorites, and the chrome yellow really brings out the yellow flowers in the green fabric. This top measures approximately 21 x 24 inches and is a smaller version of a wall quilt I pieced that Randy quilted last year. I've been wanting to make a smaller version, and even with my crummy headache, this was a pretty straightforward assembly (though I did sew several strips backward and had to take them apart to redo). Though I shuffled around gingerly most of the day, I'm glad I managed to accomplish something over the weekend. [The first photo looks wonky: it's not; the edges are straight and square.]

* * * * *

Yesterday afternoon as we talked out on the patio (I was quilting on the triangle mini and Randy was reclining back, looking up at the gorgeous sky), Randy spotted a bald eagle circling high over the back yard. We yelled to the neighbors to come see--someone grabbed binoculars and I tried to focus a shot with my digital cam (with no luck)--and we all craned our necks to watch this magnificent bird wheel and soar lazily toward the river, the sun flashing off its white head and tail. Quite wonderful. I have not seen a bald eagle since David and I were in Alaska in I think '93.

* * * * *

My gay summer reading arrived today: Andrew Holleran's Grief and Armistead Maupin's Michael Tolliver Lives. Looking forward to both.

* * * * *

Somewhere last week, I crossed the 1,000 mark: 1,022 profile views as of today. Thanks to all who've stopped by to read and enjoy my photos.

Fields of gold

As we were headed home, Randy stopped so I could snap off these two photos of the wheat field from the truck window.

Berrying (take two)

We didn't find many berries this afternoon, but as I walked along the edge of a cornfield, I ran across this beauty. This particular damselfly has always been especially significant to me, so I'm very happy to get such a great photo.

What I'm quilting now

This is the second of two hand-pieced projects that Mom handed off to me several months ago. I'm doing a basic outline stitch inside each triangle. There are 108 triangle squares, each measuring about one square inch.

Berrying (take one)

I wanted to go berrying this morning, so after a yummy breakfast of ham & eggs on biscuits, we grabbed Sadie and a few small plastic tubs (and Sadie's leash, and a bowl of water, and her grooming bag, and my camera, and Randy's camera, oh and a couple of books and our cell phones), hopped in the truck and headed up to the Overlook trail where we'd been greeted by oodles of damselflies the other day.

Today the place was swarming with gypsy moths, even at mid-day: they were everywhere, and I fear we'll have major damage next spring (I assume they are laying their eggs now on--well, on everything).

A work crew had set a new line of fence posts and was installing hurricane fencing (is there another name for that heavy mesh fencing that people so often use in their yards and dog kennels?) and almost immediately, one of the men called out and warned us that our dog needed to be on a leash. We have her-- leash, I assured him (Randy had taken Sadie off her leash once they were around the corner but not quite out of sight of the persistent nabob who, it turns out, harassed Randy not fifteen minutes later as he sat at a picnic table reading. Sadie had climbed up on the table and Jethro approached and told R to please not allow the dog up there, saying something like "people eat at these tables" (to which R responded, yes, and bugs and animals crawl on them and birds shit on them). Randy ended up taking Sadie to the truck and phoned me that it was time to leave. Jethro even followed him to the truck and started in again.

The problem is that single men are harassed in this park because it has a reputation for being a cruising area. (People with children are routinely allowed to break the "rules.") Well, fine: but arrest the lawbreakers, and leave people the fuck alone who are just trying to quietly enjoy our state parks.

So not enough berries for pie baking. Yet. Tomorrow we hit site #2.

* * * * *
An unpleasant e-mail this morning: I've been asked to turn in my key to Bucknell Hall before July 13th. Though it's understandable that departing faculty or staff should turn in their keys, I'm not really going anywhere. I've made it clear from the start of my interim editorship that I'll be around to handle West Branch biz over the summer (not the way our regular editor usually operates, but it makes no sense to me to put stuff on hold until mid-August when we're all in the frenzy of teaching preps). So okay, so fine, I'm done. I'm done, and here's my key, and if there are any fires to put out before September, well good luck with that.

* * * * *
I wasn't going to rant about that. Oh well. Screw it.

* * * * *
The Lewisburg July 4 parade is tomorrow morning, and the fireworks display is tonight. It's just grown dark as I type this out on the patio. A firefly has landed on my wrist and is making his ticklish journey up my arm--against the grain, as it were--but hasn't yet emitted its lovely greeny-yellow lantern light. I think the laptop screen is drawing them. When Randy drove to the store earlier--around six--he said that folks were already setting up their lawn chairs along the parade route. We're a small town. Those chairs will still be there in the morning.

[photo: nasturtium, 6/24/07]

New Mini

Here's the new mini. I finished the binding last night and washed the quilt in the kitchen sink, then hung it up to dry. It's ready to be mailed. The center checkerboard top was hand pieced by my Mom; I added the border, backing, and vintage 1940s binding and did the hand quilting in an overall "Baptist Fan" pattern. The quilt measures 8.75 x 12.75 inches.

* * * * *
Dad's procedure went well: one stent and several balloons, which, my sister says, is good.

Damselfly

Here's one of the damselflies we saw the other day. Really gorgeous dusty blue. I'm happy with this photo: you can see all the webbing in the wings. I must have taken 20 shots of this particular critter--it was very patient with me!

* * * * *
Hot day. I'm happy to be able to work in a nice, quiet, air-conditioned office.

* * * * *
They started cutting down several hemlock trees beside Bucknell Hall last week, to make way for a backhoe to dig a new steam line. I had not walked past the building in a few days, but this afternoon I did. Absolute carnage. A wound in the earth. I felt a piercing synesthetic moment, a visceral body shock at the sight of the ravaged space.

* * * * *
My dad's surgery is scheduled for tomorrow morning. Please send good thoughts.

Why I am not a banker

I forgot to pay Nancy & Bill last week. I realized it the morning that Nancy flew home, and put the checks in the mail immediately (same day), but it's a huge embarrassment. Doh. Double-doh.

* * * * *

We took a short trail walk this weekend up at the Overlook, a few miles out of town near Winfield: it's a wooded state park atop a rocky bluff that overlooks the river confluence at Northumberland. Two things of note: the wild raspberries are almost ripe (any day now), and there were damselflies everywhere! Probably hundreds. More than I've ever seen. Bright electric powder-blue, pale tawny yellow, all with transparent wings. All along the trail, clinging to trees, hovering near, alighting on grasses, but almost never holding still enough for me to get a good photo. Will see what I have in the camera. There should be at least one decent shot.

* * * * *

Last time I visited my folks (too long ago), Mom showed me two tiny quilt tops she had hand-pieced and asked if I thought we could make anything out of them. Sure, I said. And brought them home and set them on the bookcase in our dining room. So two weeks ago, during the June Seminar, I finished up a project and wanted something portable and remembered these really small tops (have I mentioned that they're really small? like, each square is maybe a half-inch across?), so I found a coordinating fabric to make a narrow border and used two scrap pieces of self-basting batting to put the thing together. (Self-basting batting, because you're dying to know, is slightly "sticky" and adheres when pressed between fabrics with a hot iron. It's too messy for larger quilts but really perfect for very small projects.)

So the quilt is a basic checkerboard design in two fabrics, a pale pink mini print and a sort of teal green floral. I used a medium rose-pink for the border, which will be about one inch wide when finished. The quilting pattern I decided to go with is an all-over "Baptist fan" design, which looks like tight concentric arcs that overlap in a kind of shell pattern. It has a LOT of quilting in it, and I'm nearly done. Yesterday I rummaged around and found a piece of vintage paisley dress fabric from the 1940s, which I'll use to make the binding. Will post photos by the end of the week. (Just indulge me; I'm really into this quilting thing.)

* * * * *

Quiet weekend. Quiet Monday. I did get some more poetry books listed on eBay, including Daisy Fried's second book and chapbooks by Alison Funk & Catherine Pierce. Prices are cheap and all the money goes to my press. Check 'em out.

[switching OFF shameless self-promotion mode]

[photo: blooming hosta in our garden, 6/21]

Lodestar sinks

I was sorry to hear that Lodestar Quarterly had folded: it's sad to lose another LGBTQ venue. Wishing Patrick Ryan all the best.

* * * * *

The Keystone Chapbook Prize is off to a great start! Thanks to all the folks who are spreading the word.

* * * * *

Moving out of my borrowed office this weekend is another reminder of how much paper I still manage to accumulate in a matter of a few months. Recycling isn't the problem; I just need to be more efficient at handling stuff when I first get it.

Yeah. I make piles.

[photo: shrub rose, 6/9/07]

Prose poems: a wide line?

This afternoon, a few of us walked over to Zelda's for fruit smoothies (I had a frozen chai, yumm) and a nice chat about the prose poem. Betsy passed around some books and chapbooks (I was especially drawn to Give Up by Andrew Michael Roberts) (check out all the gorgeous handbound books at Tarpaulin Sky Press) and we read a few poems. One of the interesting notions that came up is Gary Young's notion of the prose poem as one continuous line. I hope I got that right, because it makes so much sense to me: when we abandon control over the line, we have to rely on other devices to keep the poem alive and moving forward. But if we could envision a poem as one long, extended line (I think of taping a paper banner--say, six feet long--to the wall, and writing with no anxiety over the right margin), how might this alter the ways in which we imagine it and bring it into language?

I wanna try this.

Someone's poem (I should have kept notes) reminded me of the imagery in James Wright's "How My Fever Left," and it's interesting that, in that moment, I actually remembered it as a prose poem (Wright used the form well, but of course this particular poem does not). Here's Wright's poem, from The Branch Will Not Break (1963):

How My Fever Left

I can still hear her.
She hobbles downstairs to the kitchen.
She is swearing at the dishes.
She slaps her grease rags
Into a basket,
And slings it over her skinny forearm, crooked
With hatred, and stomps outside.
I can hear my father downstairs,
Standing without a coat in the open back door,
Calling to the old bat across the snow.
She’s forgotten her black shawl,
But I see her through my window, sneering,
Flapping upward
Toward some dark church on the hill.
She has to meet somebody else, and
It’s no use, she won’t listen,
She’s gone.

[photo: some black raspberries I picked for my honey on the way home today]

A few days

The June Seminar is winding down: Nancy Eimers leaves in the morning, and the Fellows depart on Thursday. We'll miss them. I'm already looking toward the rest of my summer--moving my office, completing a few final WB tasks, planning out a new course, transitioning into a new campus, working on new poems and trying to finish one of the two manuscripts I've been juggling for too long now--and the first task alone is daunting. Too much paper. So many books. Another reason to stay home, read for the sheer pleasure of it, spend some time with Randy.

And there's always the garden. The columbines are starting to release their first seeds: the pale green clawlike pods split open and out fall shiny black seeds, smaller than sesame seeds and more rounded, more oval. I want to set up lights on the basement landing (just off the kitchen) and start some more perennials. It's much too hot in the attic now.

* * * * *

Last week, Bill Olsen and I were talking about Thomas Lynch and recommending his wonderful book The Undertaking to someone (can't remember who). Bill said that Lynch was an advisor to Six Feet Under (possibly my favorite TV series ever), and that his name can be found in the credits! How did I not know this?

Here's a poem from Thomas Lynch's Still Life in Milford:

Vigil

Rose, you are the winter oak
whose spent leaves redden and remain
limp emblems of the heart’s accustomed hold
on this—the known life of seasons,
daylights, nightfalls, weathers—
the ordinary calendars, mean time.
Ordinarily we live our lives out
hopeful and afloat among the rounded metaphors:
seedtime and harvest, dark and dawn;
solstice and equinox, calm, storm.
Ignoring the linear paradigms we move
buoyantly between our pasts and futures
gamely trading prospects for remembrances,
deaf to the regular changing of tenses—
those doorways slamming down the narrowing hall.
Behind the doors, we hear the voices still:
Goodnight. Godspeed. God Bless. Get Well. Goodbye.
The deaths we seldom grieve but set our watches by.

* * * * *

[photo: beetle I released from my office yesterday]

KEYSTONE CHAPBOOK PRIZE

The KEYSTONE CHAPBOOK PRIZE is up and running. See full guidelines below. Open to Pennsylvania poets and PA-themed manuscripts. Please spread the word!

* * * * *
SEVEN KITCHENS PRESS
2007 Keystone Chapbook Award – for Pennsylvania Poets
Prize: $100 plus 25 copies.
Submission deadline: Postmarked between June 17 and August 17 of each year.
Eligibility: Open to all Pennsylvania poets [see complete guidelines below].

COMPLETE GUIDELINES:

Any poet who was born, has lived, or currently lives in Pennsylvania is eligible to submit to the Keystone Chapbook Award. Additionally, poets living elsewhere may submit manuscripts which show a strong connection to Pennsylvania.

Submit a paginated manuscript of 16-20 pages (not including front matter) of poetry. Include two cover pages: one with the manuscript title, author name, address, e-mail and phone number; the second cover page should have the manuscript title only. Include a table of contents page. Include, if applicable, an acknowledgments page for work previously published.Please include, on a separate page, a brief (100-150 words) biographical note, which must address your specific connection to Pennsylvania (if you do not currently reside here).

The author’s name should not appear in the manuscript.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but you must notify us promptly if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere.

Submissions must be posted between June 17 and August 17. The winning manuscript will be announced on or before October 15. Manuscript finalists will also be announced, and may be eligible for spring/summer publication in the Keystone Chapbook Series.

Manuscripts will not be returned. E-mailed submission is preferred, but you may send via regular mail.

Do not staple or bind your manuscript. If you are sending by mail, please use a binder clip and mail flat in an 8.5 x 11 envelope. If you are sending by e-mail, please send one document in Microsoft Word format (.doc or .rtf files are ideal); you must include the words “Keystone Chapbook” in the subject line of your e-mail.

Include a $12 reading fee with each manuscript you submit. Multiple submissions are acceptable. Checks should be made payable to Ron Mohring. Online payment may be made via PayPal to sevenkitchens at yahoo dot com. Each entrant will receive one copy of the winning chapbook, to be published on or before December 31.

The winner will receive $100 and 25 copies of their chapbook. Additionally, the publisher will distribute ten review copies and will solicit online reviews of the chapbook.

Send your manuscript:
~ by e-mail, as a Microsoft Word attachment, to: sevenkitchens at yahoo dot com; or
~ by mail to Ron Mohring, Publisher & Editor; PO Box 668; Lewisburg PA 17837.

Poke

Pokeweed, that is: such a lovely plant, really, with purple stems, intense green leaves, and creamy flower spikes like this one. Of course the deep purple berries are beautiful in the fall as well. This plant is blooming in a stand of wild raspberries that I'm keeping my eye on.

* * * * *

Congratulations to Jeff Mann on his Lammy! It's about time!

* * * * *

Randy's cooking Indian tonight: we're having company. I need to break down my sewing station so we can use the dining table. (I'm making a miniature album quilt, with blocks signed by the faculty and fellows in the June Seminar. Pictures available soon.)

* * * * *

[photo: Pokeweed blossom, 6/13/07]

Don't do this

I was just talking last week about the time I lost my pocket journal (one of those miniature pocket-sized composition books) in the laundry. You'd think that, having done it once, I'd now have the sense to double-check my pockets, but this photo shows what's left of yet another journal that went through the wash. (Randy, bless him, discovered it before it went through the dryer.) It's still damp, but there appears to be a lot of ink left inside. I'm waiting for it to dry on the windowsill before I attempt to prise apart the pages and see what remains.

I don't lose things. This is what I tell myself: they are not lost. They're around. They're right where they're supposed to be. It's just that, temporarily, I can't recall where I left them: my post office box key (why did I take it off the key ring in the first place?); my pocketknife; a favorite photograph of my mother that I tucked into a book but then, because I couldn't recall which book, it essentially went missing for several years. And when they show up, there's always this of course moment: not so much found as reestablished, slipping through the muzzy veil of my consciousness into my visible, tangible world again.

Writers, check your pockets twice.

* * * * *

My book auctions are back again over at eBay. I'll be listing a bunch of poetry over the next few weeks, as well as some other stuff. All monies go to support my publishing venture, Seven Kitchens Press. Please check back often.

Metaphor and a manual typewriter

Deirdre led an interesting session this morning with the June Poets: a "poetic identity" metaphor exercise, in which each writer describes or invents a metaphorical identity--for example, "as a poet, I am the bridge: I connect but remain fixed; the world travels both over and under me . . ." (and so on) (my own poor example, not D's). Then we all wrote for about twenty minutes to expand/ embellish the metaphor (or start with a fresh one), and finally, the papers were shuffled and redistributed so we each received someone else's metaphor. We then read them aloud. The next step is for each of us to write a poem for Friday that somehow inhabits or responds to the metaphors we were given. I've done this exercise in the past; it always prompts something interesting.

* * * * *
When I inherited Bob Taylor's office for a year, I also got his Royal typewriter: a hefty monster that I moved to my current office last summer. Today I lugged it downhill to the Poetry Center and set it up in the reading library, hoping the poets might have some fun by collaborating on a few poems, pecking them out line by line.

* * * * *
It's great to see that Earl Pickens' new video is getting steady attention. A few weeks ago, having been given the heads up by Earl himself, Randy and I walked over to Market Street to watch the filming of the video's last segment in front of the Campus Theatre, where they changed the marquee to display Earl's name (and his new song title). Nice. And yes, he really does know how to ride that unicycle. Even if I could ride one, I'd be too terrified to do it across the George Washington Bridge (and that goes double for the New Jersey Turnpike).

* * * * *
I'm really slow at reading literary journals, and look forward to the summer when I can catch up. I love this poem by Catherine Bowman, from the spring '06 issue of Ploughshares edited by (former June Poet) Kevin Young:

Names of Tulips, Good Friday

All Winter I’ve Waiteds.
The Then You Came Backs.
Wands. Wounds. Tarot Cups. Lisps.
Strapless Dresses. Sylvia Tears.
Conjugations. Anne Frank’s Looms.
Another Man Done Gone.
Kleenex After Sex. Mrs. Manner’s Accidents.
The How Funerals.
The Greedy Toos.
Freaks. The What Happens Every Afternoon.
The Purple Spot on My Neck.
The Eye Tricks. Children’s Bibles.
The Favorite Parts of His Body.
His Forty Last Words.

June swirl

The June Seminar is in full swing. I'm re-reading poems for my afternoon workshop. The June Poets (the early risers anyway) are over in the seminar room for an informal discussion/ knockdown on Frank O'Hara vs. Wallace Stevens (poetry of lived experience vs. poetry of the imagination).

It's raining gently; the tiger lily that rises into a double tower outside this basement office window is spangled with rain, like beads on its frilly crowns. It leans slightly away from the window, as if nodding. (We watched "The Queen" yesterday on DVD and the imagery has obviously lingered--so much decorous pressure!)

Karla Kelsey and Bill Olsen arrive this week, Karla for a one-day visit and Bill for half the Seminar. I just picked up Bill's new book, Avenue of Vanishing. Still in its shrinkwrap, it waits here on my desk for a block of quiet time. I think he's an amazing poet. So many of his lines strike like little hammers in my brain.

My father is having a procedure this morning. They're trying to save his legs.

Sun breaks through for a moment, then retreats. A crow in the hemlocks beside Bucknell Hall shakes down a shower of rain to the slate sidewalk. The windowsill, a white box one foot deep, is at chin level. When I stand to look out at the lilies, I see there are three lesser stems in addition to the two tall ones. Later this summer, they will bloom, bright orange with dark speckles, heavy with pollen: the petals will unhinge and fall after only a few days. All along the stem, each leaf axis will cradle a small purple-black bulbil. These grow to about the size of a pea before being dislodged and falling to the ground. I collected some three years ago; one of the plants that grew from them is a foot tall and may bloom this year. My grandfather had these lilies in his garden; when I was about ten, he showed me the bulbils one day, thumbing one off the stem and handing it to me: If you plant this, it will make another one.

Here's a poem by Brendan Galvin, from Great Blue (1990):

Glass

What the warbler must have seen
was the world swung round;
without turning back
she was flying into
a distance already passed through:

another side of the woodpile
she had just cleared in a single pitch,
and beyond, through the middle ground
of pines, the background glitter
of running sea she had skipped above
like a flat stone thrown so well
it touches down on water
all the way to the other shore.

Swung round,
only slightly blurred.
Trees twinning,
far water grained,
air of a density . . .

then that split-second insight

into splashes of newspaper
and clothing,
filtered through
final dusts of light.

As perhaps,
in our last seconds,
we are swung round
to live ourselves back through
each particular,
to fall faster and faster
out of loves, out of
changes of clothes,
whole snows lifting skyward
becoming autumn leaves lifting
back into the green trees,
the dead stepping out of
crumbling loam,

at the last, seed and egg
unraveling, falling away.

And all
in the time
it takes a flat stone to skip over water
and be let in.

[photo: Crow, May 15]

Half-days

That's all I can commit to the office lately, even though I have tons of work to prepare for my fall classes and a few lingering details to close out with West Branch. The weather's just too nice to stay indoors; I need to slow down and recharge; it's good to spend quality time with Randy. All the above.

Walking home, I've been noticing the gorgeous drifts of bluets on the hill above Bucknell Hall: one of the delightful "common names" for these tiny flowers is Quaker Ladies. They form miniscule clumps just a few inches high, and each bears more flowers than leaves. Every year I dig up a few with my pocketknife, to carry home and plant in our small lawn, hoping they'll "take"--we had only one plant come back from seed this year, but I've read that they're finicky about cross-pollination: a clump will not self-fertilize, but must be cross-pollinated with a separate plant, thus strengthening the species. I'm going to keep a closer watch on them this year, and try to harvest some fresh seeds before the mowers get them all.
* * * * *

Congratulations to Robin Becker, who will be the Gary J. Sojka Visiting Poet at Bucknell this fall. Robin will give a Q & A at 4 pm, and a reading at 7 pm, on November 6.
* * * * *
[photo: bluets, 5/6/07]

Time

I don't manage time as well as I could. Just writing that sentence has me quibbling with the notion that time can be managed: it can't. It just happens. It's more accurate for me to say that I don't follow through on half my ideas and plans. During the semester, there's a constant underlying aura of stress--not enough time (to write, for example; or to do things with my husband, which is equally important), though I've trained myself to allow for "down time" and try not to feel guilty about that.

Summers are more complicated: this is one of the lucky years in which I'm "coasting" on a twelve-month salary, every penny of which is earned (thank you) from August through May. Each day presents the opportunity for down time, or its illusion anyway, because I had to set aside so many projects during the academic year and can't even begin to decide which to focus on now. So I garden, full-tilt, immersing myself in it for a day or two until my back aches, though every hour in the garden is worth it, especially now when the changes come so quickly: the heirloom irises I snagged from Mom's garden a couple years ago suddenly have buds: first one, then a second later the same day, then a third the next morning--I could almost believe that, if I chose the right moment, I might actually be able to sit and watch them emerge from their envelope-like casings.

Yesterday we had intermittent rain (which we needed); I worked a few hours in my office on lingering West Branch stuff. It was nice to work at a relaxed pace and to leave early. The rain let up in the afternoon, long enough for me to get out and plant the basil seedlings: these are the Genovese basils I started in an egg carton under lights in the attic. A few weeks ago, when I repotted the "Fish" peppers from their egg carton, the basils were ready to be upsized as well, but I had no room. So I'm afraid that forcing them to overstay their cramped quarters may be detrimental. I guess we'll see.

I popped all eighteen plants into two of the upended clay drainage tiles I've set alongside the patio. We tried basil in one of them last year (the other two held rau rom and an ancient sorrel plant that finally gave up the ghost this winter) and it was such a huge success that we're going all-basil this season. The third planter (or first--the one with the most sunlight) is reserved for spicy globe basil, which is coming along very well in the attic and is just about ready to transplant.

In the laundry room-cum-garden shed, I dug out an old roll of copper sheeting ("craft" copper that I think we originally bought with the idea of covering some birhouse roofs) and cut strips to crimp around the edges of one basil planter. The damp weather had drawn out the slugs, which were all over the lemon balm, and I remembered reading that a copper barrier is supposed to curtail snails and their slime-footed cousins by generating an electrical shock as they slither across it. So, as an experiment, I covered the edges of one planter with w two-inch wide strip of copper, but left the other bare. Will report back if I notice any definitive results.

Oh: I also planted nine geranium seedlings in a heavy old painted metal planter that I swiped from beside the neighbor's garage--there are three more planters, they've been there for years (really, the ivy that covers that area has started to cover these planters as well) and I figure if they notice one's missing and say anything, I'll apologize and offer them a fern or something. The geraniums are a Burpee mix that came up very quickly and developed nice, stocky plants under the attic lights. I've had them in individual pots on the laundry room sill for two weeks.

A confession: gardening reinforces my OCD tendency to "collect" containers. I find it very hard to resist "trying out" various plastic containers, for example, to see how well they'll serve as flowerpots. For a few years, I saved Dannon yogurt cups, because they came with clear plastic lids and were thus great for starting really small seeds (like coleus). This winter, I started stockpiling my plastic Diet Coke bottles in a desk drawer. I cut them basically in half, and they made very serviceable planters for the move from egg carton stage to windowsill stage. [An aside: getting the geraniums out of their Coke bottle planters was problematic, because of the bottles "narrow hipped" shape. Normally, a good slap on the bottom is enough to dislodge a healthy root ball from a properly-tapered planter. I had to repeatedly slap, shake, and jiggle the plants out, which caused needless stress to their root systems. I think they'll bounce right back, but clearly I need to go back to yogurt cups: they few geraniums I grew in some leftover yogurt cups slipped right out with roots and soil in a nice, intact ball.]

So I'll be washing the Coke cut-downs and tossing them into the recycle bag this week. Randy will be relieved: he's already embarrassed by some of the containers I hang onto, and calls me a White Trash Gardener, a moniker I've totally earned. But it's worth the results.

Grades are in

Turned the last of my grades in today. This is done online, which is actually pretty nice: you can log in and add (or change) final grades up until the deadline, at which point they process the whole thing. (I haven't a clue about the proper terminology.) Anyway, I graded portfolios on Thursday, on Friday, on Saturday, on Sunday. So I practically skipped all the way home this afternoon: what to do first?

The garden, of course: two weekends ago, I got up early Saturday to haul our garden clippings (branches, leaves, pine needles, pulled weeds) over to the dump. Well, it's not exactly a dump, though folks haul their yard waste there. The borough brings in these ENORMOUS grinding machines, which pulverize bamboo, whole shrubs, entire christmas trees, into great mounds of mulch, which is periodically turned by bulldozer. So you drop off your green stuff and take away free mulch. I brought home half a truckload and piled it in a corner of the driveway.

So I have some catching up to do in the garden. It was so nice to get out there for a few hours. The columbines are just blooming--these are plants I grew from seed last year, and they were marvelous; they're much smaller this year, though the double flowers are still wonderful. All the ferns and hostas are up; the ajuga is in full bloom (both the blue-violet and a nice pale lavender), but the show-stealers this week are the sweet violets, which we've been encouraging for a few years now. They're in full bloom, just beautiful.

We have a small patch of Lily-of-the-valley that's just now in bloom. The scent carries through the whole yard, heavier than freesia, an almost unbearably sweet perfume that takes me back to my childhood: I used to feel so proud to pick a wee bouquet for my Mom every May.

* * * * *
Congratulations to Jim Harms, whose poem "We Started Home, My Son and I" (from West Branch # 58) has won a Pushcart Prize!