One of a kind

People ask, Why don't you sell your quilts? The answer is that we're usually working on a quilt intended for someone. We plan to sell more of our smaller quilts--the minis (usually less than 20 inches square) and wall quilts (usually around 40 inches square), but right now R is working on a full-sized commissioned quilt and I'm toggling between two projects that I hope to complete before May. Meanwhile, here's this: a "Honeycomb" pattern, completely pieced and quilted by hand, that I finished in mid-October. I've enjoyed seeing it on our project wall, but I always knew I would let it go if presented with the right offer. Enjoy the purty pictures and read on for more information on this unique wall quilt, or check back another day when I'm not screwing up the courage to be so self-promotional and have returned to my general ramblings.

Dimensions are 27.5 inches wide by 31 inches tall. The center medallion is paper-pieced using the English paper-piece method (fabric pieces are individually basted onto small hexagonal papers then sewn together into an overall pattern) (I was actually piecing this at AWP in Atlanta), then hand-appliqued onto the navy border fabric. The red binding is hand-sewn. Most of the medallion fabrics are vintage, and there is some slight variation in tone, especially in the red and yellow. I hand-quilted a scrolling border in the blue frame, and the medallion is hand-quilted in a "row outline" stitch (see backing photo for a clearer idea of this). This quilt is dated and signed by me, and is one of a kind; I don't plan on making another.

This quilt is for sale. The price is $75. E-mail me if you're interested.

Snow Day

It was snowing when we woke up this morning--heavy, wet flakes falling fast--and it's continued throughout the day. We've taken turns going out with a broom to knock the snow from the Japanese maple in the back yard (it still has most of its leaves, and we're afraid some branches might break from the weight). A lovely sight, really, but I hope the roads are navigable in the morning.

Night Ride Home

It's dark before I leave campus to drive home over our little mountains. On my morning commute, I'm usually rushing and don't have time to pull over, aim the camera at the sugar maples flaring into near-levitating masses of butterscotch yellow. The red maples are nearly finished--just a few clutches of leaves burning now--and the thornless honey locusts, such a screaming yellow a few days ago in the rain, are nearly denuded. Fog in the mountains nearly every morning--some days I literally drive through a cloud or two--and a bit of snow yesterday, not enough to stick but just a foretaste of what's to come. On the drive home, I pointed the camera unsteadily at some oncoming headlights and came up with this shot.

* * *

From Gary Soto's poem, "At the All-Night Cafe":

America is at work. There is the splotch of blue neon
Behind the left leg, renegade line in the right eye.

* * *

My copy of Jill Rosser's new book, Foiled Again, arrived yesterday at the office. It's the winner of this year's New Criterion Prize. Looking forward to reading it over the holiday.

* * *

This afternoon we sorted through clothes and cleaned out two bags full (including several jackets) to donate to a campus clothing drive. I can actually find my winter shirts now (and my gloves and scarf)!

* * *

R just came back from the grocery with a surprise for me: a zygocactus, loaded with salmon buds. Very nice! We are doing some attic cleaning tomorrow, and today bought a couple of plant lights for the shelves I use to start seedlings in late winter. This afternoon, in the garden, I saw that one of our hostas had ripe seed pods, so I picked them to bring inside. As the pods dry, they'll split along three seams and open, revealing the black seeds all tucked in neat rows. The hosta's seed apparatus looks a bit like a maple seed (i.e., somewhat winged), but it's much smaller and very thin. I've had good success with planting them, and the seedlings grow to blooming size within two or three years.

* * *

Kooser

Boarding House

The blind man draws his curtains for the night
and goes to bed, leaving a burning light

above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall,
he hears the deaf man walking down the hall

in his squeaky shoes to see if there’s a light
under the blind man’s door, and all is right.

: Ted Kooser, Sure Signs (1980)

* * *

Meeting with poetry students all day. I dashed over to the library for a prepackaged turkey sandwich. Checked my mailbox on the way back and there were my copies of the new West Branch. Great cover art by Jeff Cohen. Four lead-off poems by Rebecca Dunham. This is the issue I edited last spring; I'll undoubtedly brag some more about it over the next couple of weeks.
* * *

I had a very nice breakfast last week with Robin Becker, the day after her reading at Bucknell. We're hatching a plan. More news soon.
* * *

Next week: Thanksgiving break. I'll be putting Harry's chapbook together and catching up on essay grading.
* * *

So nice to hear from Miriam.

[photo: boxwood shadow]

Just last week

the sumac was so vivid. Now it's almost gone: rained down.

Giving books: 8

also, not pictured: Howard Moss' Rules of Sleep & Connie Voisine's Cathedral of the North.

Giving books: 7

Giving books: 6

also, not pictured: Dennis Nurkse's Voices Over Water & James Tate's The Lost Pilot.

Trick or treat

The munchkins are at our door tonight, rapping, tapping, kicking and squealing for attention. We were trying to eat a quiet dinner. I suggested offering some steamed broccoli. Randy had a better idea: posting a SEXUAL PREDATOR: BEWARE sign on our front door. (Ha!)

* * *

Listening to EmmyLou Harris, Wrecking Ball. Love that CD. Grading papers until 9, when we watch an hour of television (as we quilt). I'm trying to get to bed by ten. Now that the weather's growing colder, it's SO hard to get out of bed at six.

* * *

Just saw Paul Guest's wonderful news: congratulations, Paul! A well-deserved award.

* * *

We were delighted to watch the Red Sox sweep what's-their-name, that team in Colorado. Now the long wait until spring (training) begins. In honor of the Sox, here's a poem by Joe Wenderoth, from his 1995 book, Disfortune:

Aesthetics Of The Bases Loaded Walk

Four times the pitch is outside the strike zone:
high, low, outside, low—four balls.
The man must be given a base, a base on balls.
But there is no base to be given,
no base unoccupied, the bases are full.
Some cannot understand this.
They believe it must be a shameful thing,
lowly forfeit,
the humiliation of man-made rules and chalk boundaries.
They imagine confrontation itself has failed.
Some, even most, don’t understand the bases loaded walk,
and they proceed to hiss
or to mock their earlier earnest applause.
But I love it.
They’ve got no room to put him on.
They put him on. They put him on
and here comes the lowly run
home. Certain, uncontested,
and incomparably calm.
A home-run would have been unbelievable—
the grand slam, loveliest of moments
to glimpse—
but it leads quickly, inevitably, away from us.
Bases empty.
Rally as good as over.
But a walk! a walk! Bases still loaded!
Rally never at a more urgent or capable point!
This is the beauty of it.
The maintenance of a simple danger by way of a good eye.
The inning, the game itself,
hangs in the indelicate balance
of this subtlest method for staying alive,
in the casual implication of unending loss,
in the terrible patience of an anonymous victory.

* * *

Brent is so much better than I at writing prose poems. I doff my cap.

* * *

Samhain blessings to all.
* * *

[photo: Cloud #3, 10/12/07]

Giving books: 5

also, not pictured: William Corbett's Don't Think: Look & John Haines' At the End of This Summer.

What I'm reading

Tea Bags

Remembering, she agitates hand washables
from which dirt streams; delicate things, her white
regulation underwear still damp when she puts it on.

-Thylias Moss, Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler

Giving books: 4

Blur

Today was pretty much the Hump Day of the Hump Week of the Hump Month: the semester is a downhill road from here. Students who haven't managed to overcome their propensity for oversleeping, spacing out in class or with homework, and the like are probably not going to pull out of their current patterns, and this is the week when I stop overextending myself and trying to haul them back onto the Happy Raft. Sink or swim, y'all. I have my own paddling to do.

* * *

We're trying a different med for the headaches. We'll see how it goes.

* * *

And now, let's play Name That Novel! I copied pages from several books, pulled more-or-less randomly from home, to use for our erasures a while back. A few days later, in one of my comp sections, something made me remember and refer to the following passage. Students swore I was misremembering the scene, and that it was from another of the author's novels, but when I came home and checked, there it was--and here it is:

". . . [X], frightened at the spreading thighs, alone in the house, and horrified at the screaming wretch his wife had become, went mad with apprehension. Using his hands, his strong fingers for forceps, he had pulled and twisted the baby. The midwife, arriving late, had found the baby's head pulled out of shape, its neck stretched, its body warped; and she had pushed the head back and molded the body with her hands. But [X] always remembered, and was ashamed."

First person to correctly identify the title and author wins, oh I don't know, a slightly dogeared copy of Allison Funk's chapbook From the Sketchbooks of Vanessa Bell. (A nice chapbook!)

* * *

Two words: GO, BOSTON!

[photo: driver's side blur, 10/12/07]

Giving books: 3

also, not pictured: Mark Doty's Turtle, Swan & Denise Duhamel's Girl Soldier.

Keystone Chapbook Results

The results of the 2007 Keystone Chapbook Competition are in: from the sixty manuscripts entered, our final judge, Jeff Mann, has selected "Underground Singing" by Harry Humes as the winner. Mann praised the manuscript as "a lyrical yet realistic description of coal-town life" that "displays admirable lucidity and accessibility, a haunting, sharp-eyed nostalgia, and vividly evoked detail."

The first runner-up manuscript was "Still," by Deborah Burnham of Philadelphia. The judge commented that the manuscript "brims with finely phrased appreciation of the romantic and the erotic, as well as displaying remarkably fresh figurative language and sensuous imagery."

The second runner-up manuscript, by Jillian Barnet of Pittsburgh, was "You Don't Need a Nose and Other Things I've Learned." Mann assessed this manuscript as "shocking, painful, blunt" and said "these poems of hospital tragedies, disease, and death remind us of how much can go wrong, how much there is to lose, and thus how much there is to celebrate while circumstances allow."

We are delighted to publish Harry Humes' collection this fall. Copies will be distributed to all contest entrants, and will be available for sale in January 2008. If you would like to review this chapbook, please e-mail me.

Thanks to all who entered this year--the judge remarked on the difficulty of selecting among many truly excellent manuscripts--and thanks, also, to everyone who helped to spread the word.

About the judge: Jeff Mann grew up in Covington, Virginia, and Hinton, West Virginia, receiving degrees in English and forestry from West Virginia University. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in many publications, including The Spoon River Poetry Review, Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry 1950-1999, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Laurel Review, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Crab Orchard Review, West Branch, Bloom, and Appalachian Heritage. He has published three award-winning poetry chapbooks, Bliss, Mountain Fireflies, and Flint Shards from Sussex; and two full-length books of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine and On the Tongue. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

[photo: cornfield, 10/09/04]

Giving books: 2

Giving books

Library poetry

The campus library is small: a few floors occupying one wing of the academic building which I almost never need to leave. I drive to Williamsport in early morning fog--sometimes the mountains and the other side of the river are completely obscured in mist--and, at the end of the day, I take the stairs (or elevator, depending on how late, how tired) and exit the building, breathe the outside air for the first time in ten hours. People do this everywhere, of course, but working in a windowless office has me looking up at the sky more frequently of late: late sky, early sky, sunrise and sunset, but almost never the sky in between. To get out of my office, I've been scoping out the library for comfortable niches, out-of-the-way tables with cozy chairs, hiding places where I can grade papers for an hour or two before my official office hours begin.

Last week, as I was leaving the library, I asked the young girl at the circulation desk where the poetry books were shelved. PS3569? I asked. Which floor? Feeling not a little ashamed that I'd been on campus for well over a month yet hadn't checked out a single book, I went back upstairs in search of poetry.

Many of the volumes in the poetry section are old. Incredibly old. Beautiful old embossed covers with hand-inked numbers on their spines, leaning together like old men dozing on park benches, untouched for decades. I saw few contemporary volumes. Gathered up a William Stafford, a James Wright, a Richard Hugo--Come on, boys, let's get some air--and a slender book, Like Wings by Philip Schultz, a poet I really know nothing about. I took the Schultz because of two lines: the first, from a poem I opened randomly to, "The Elevator":

This elevator lugged Teddy Roosevelt
when they both were new.

The second was a line by Whitman, set as an epigraph to the section of the book titled "Main Streets":

These are the days that must happen to you.

Downstairs again at the circulation desk, I watched a young man sorting oversized art books on a wheeled cart. Though he was facing me, he didn't look up from his task for at least two minutes. I could have cleared my throat. I didn't mind waiting. When he finally noticed me, he rushed over, apologizing profusely. He took my faculty card, scanned the bar code from it and from the inside covers of my books. The Philip Schultz still has a card pocket inside the back cover, and the original check-out card is still in the pocket. The book was published in 1978. The card is stamped only once, DEC 7 '79, and the borrower's name, written in ink in the topmost blue-lined space, is Pam Mazzotta. I like that Pam's signature is still tucked into the book. I thought of writing a small poem on the back of the card (the blank side), and wondered how many years might pass before anyone noticed it. I go to the public library, the boy said.

(? )

They have a lot more poetry than we do, he stammered. It's just over there--he gestured vaguely toward the river--across from, ahh, across--it's just maybe a block that way.

I thanked him, wondering if I'd ever set foot on a Williamsport sidewalk, or whether this one-year gig would consist entirely of time spent commuting to and from this one campus building. * * * * *
Derek Walcott is being paid a large sum of money to give a talk at Bucknell tonight. He should be launching into it right about now.
* * * * *
I met my new physician yesterday morning. Had to change health plans because Williamsport, where I work, is outside the range of my previous health plan. I was fortunate, both last year and this, to get health insurance as part of my contract. For most of our time in Pennsylvania, I've had to go without.

Dr. H seems nice: a good listener, proficient at posing nicely open-ended questions and gleaning (presumably) useful data from my babble. He strikes me as more assertively diagnostic than my previous physician (who I liked well enough): he wants, for instance, to have a good look at my brain, and so I'm scheduled for a cranial MRI on Thursday afternoon. It would be a relief to find the cause of my headaches. Or at least the source of the voices. (Kidding.)
* * * * *
Here's a poem from the Philip Schultz book that reminds me of something I read recently by a young poet (I'll try to find the latter poem):

What I Don’t Want

Die slouched & undecided in a girlie show
watching her lambs eat the wolves.
Sit talking Kafka this Kafka that
(that bugfaced sword-swallower!).
Play deaf & dumb in Chicago.
Chew the fat of the land while looking
up somebody’s left leg for the right word, ever again.
Cross the Golden Gate Bridge on a bus
listening to the guy ahead say: Doesn’t it look
like a G-string all lit up, Fran!
Die in the house where I was born,
a happy man.

I want, Lord, to die with Neruda & Chaplin
naked & sinful
eating cheese so old it sings on my tongue.

* * * * *
Oh. Found it: a poem by Aaron Anstett, from No Accident (2005). No wonder I was reminded of Aaron's poem--look at the similiarities in rhetoric, voice & setting:

Prayer Against Dying on Camera

Lord, not shot in liquor store stick-up,
jugular uncorked and finely misting or

splatter-patterning display case plate glass
and me so many pixels collapsing

at the feet of bikini’d cardboard
cutout models, purchase a puddle,

last words of my kind, “Oh, shit,”
lip-readable. Jesus not suddenly

in latex novelty emporium or slam-
bang stroke on jumbotron in a coliseum

screaming, not tumbling
from the burning building in a series

of photographs, speed increasing,
one frame famous because I look so calm.
* * * * *
In my poetry class this morning, we did erasures of pages I'd copied, as randomly as possible, from my books at home. We had a marvelous time. The undercurrents, the astonishing shifts in tone from the original texts (which each student read a sample of before reading her erasure), the "rescuing" of words that slipped right past our ears in the initial texts but felt so apt in the re-visions that we could hardly believe they'd been right there on the pages--all great fun. I'm enjoying my LC students, but the 8 AM poetry class (say it!) nurtures my soul.

[photo: Laurel, 9/1/07, R B Winter State Park]

I'm still here

I'm still here, just swamped with work. Toss me a bail bucket. Fly me to the moon. Let me play among the stars. Or in the trees, before their leaves leave; that sounds nice. I'm starting to envy the acrobatic squirrels.

[photo: Maples, 5/16/07]

Linda McCarriston

TRADITIONAL

She has nothing, neither
power nor wealth, but what
the father of her children
gives her. All is well. She
remains beautiful on a pittance.
They have acquiesced to the stale-
mate that is sex and make do
now with each other’s public
desirability, private near-
brushes in the bed each night.
And when war comes and calls for
her sons, though she may sit on
damask or plush and drink red
or white, as she chooses,
and lament to friends, provided
they are women, all, she can but
suffer the loss of what she has
furnished. She cannot toss
her sabots into the gears that
sustain her. She cannot tear the
clothes off her own beautiful
body and barter.

: Linda McCarriston, Little River

How it feels

[9/21 - 9/23:]

A window slowly wiped clean of fog. (No.)

A mirror in fragments on the pavement,

one shard catching the sun,

burning my eye. (No.) A saucepan

dropped and clattering down stairs,

but I am in the pan and the falling

takes days. On the third day I ease

myself out. Stand up. Something trickles

from my ear. The dented pan

still ringing. I place it

on my head.

A week, you say?

Well so it has been. I'm dog-tired, it's past my bedtime, and the alarm goes off at six in the morning. I can't blog about it today . . . I'll--I'll blog about it tomorrow! (After all, tomorrow IS another day!)


[photo: fallen hornet, aug 8 2007]

Line 'em up

I'm armed and ready for a fresh stack of compositions. No, I don't use red ink.

* * *

Here's a poem by Dionisio Martínez, from History as a Second Language:

Charlie Parker: Almost Like Being in Love

These are the shadows of water when water

is thick and no longer transparent.

They are everywhere--on the walls,

across the ceiling.

It was always this good.

One night you undressed me in my sleep.

Very slowly, you told me later.

You said I smelled good.

The sweater, I said. I'd taken it

out of the drawer where I kept

my winter clothes.

It smelled of pine and a long summer.

No, you said. Not wood.

More like the inside of a saxophone case,

all velvet and sweet regrets.

All blues, I said. Blues

and whatever shadows are made of,

I said, falling on you like slow water.

"a little boyish, a little ghostly"

Here's another poem from Ann Townsend's excellent chapbook, The Braille Woods:

Nude

At first, only the soaking sound of the shower.
Dense, dizzy, he rinses the soap from his body,

without care, without love, and steps dripping
onto the tile. His face is still eclipsed in sleep;

his hand reaches for the fallen towel,
muscles curving in from the elbow,

pulling up again to perform the simplest motion,
smoothing towel against skin. Threshed by air,

the cedars rustle and sweep in the back yard,
their branches bobbing, needles cloudy

in the scattered morning light. He shivers,
folding back the shutters, and waits there,

his body no more than a momentary colorless echo,
a little boyish, a little ghostly,

while the morning comes on. In the next room,
his underwear and socks lie neatly folded

on the bed, and a row of shirts waits from him
to push past their various fabrics

and pull out his choice, as if his body were a frame
on which to drape landscapes, patterns and plaids,

an architecture of clean skin, wakening muscle,
nerves willingly alive to the watching world.

[photo: autumn laurel, 9/1/07]

"in games that go on and on"

The Hour of Grace

I used to think it could be solved this way:
like people gathering in the station at midnight
for the last bus that will not come,
at first just a few, then more and more.
That was a chance to be close to one another,
to change everything, together
to start a new world.

But they disperse.
(The hour of grace has passed. It won’t
come again.) Each one will go his own way.
Each will be a domino again
with one side up, looking
for another piece to match it
in games that go on and on.

: Yehuda Amichai

[photo: storm cloud, 5/10/07]

Inside, looking out

I'm working through a stack--a big honking stack--of student essay drafts, trying to generate supportive comments to offset the plethora of marked errors. I'm reminded of the title of Leslie Ullman's book, Slow Work Through Sand. Gimme water.

* * *

We had a scare: R was experiencing terrible pain and other symptoms which, gentle readers, I'll decline to describe. We thought it was a kidney stone. Doctor's office opened at one this afternoon and they urged him to come in as soon as he described his symptoms. Tests determined it's not a kidney stone but a significant infection. He's feeling miserable. I'm upstairs working. He's flat-out exhausted. Send love.

* * *

I don't think I've stepped outside all day. Photo: the house across the street when viewed through one of the tiny oval holes in the mini blinds through which the slats are threaded.

Interstices

Maxine Kumin uses the term "interstices" in her book Always Beginning to describe the often-unscheduled or unplanned gifts of time in which she's trained herself to write. I'm still adjusting to my new work schedule (and working out the commute by trying to find reliable ride-share neighbors), so I'm more conscious than ever of the small interstices that pop up through my day. I need more self-discipline, of course (though I think I'm managing the workload pretty well so far), but I also need to be more attentive, to consciously recognize (and utilize) these small but valuable interstices.

* * *

Keystone Chapbook Update: Here, in no particular order, are the log numbers of the ten manuscripts which the final judge is reading this month:

70802; 70804; 70720; 70601; 70712; 70818; 70602; 70702; 70722; 70806.

At least ten other manuscripts came very close!

* * *

After teaching my 8:00 yesterday, Randy & I drove to Harrisburg for the quilt show. I felt a sneaky delight in lingering near his quilt to listen as people complimented his work. Very proud of him.

[photo: Light Surface #1, 9/1/07]

A walk in the woods

R and I had to get away yesterday. Fortunately, getting away is easy: a 20-minute drive to R.B. Winter State Park and we were on (and off) the trails, encountering relatively few people (considering the holiday weekend).

We brought our cameras. I'm drawn mainly to surface texture and the play of light and shadow, so I'll take either super-close-up macro shots of leaves and lichen or, conversely, deliberately out-of-focus shots to convey (hopefully) more mood than content. The pic I'm posting today is of neither category: more like a snapshot, I guess.

It was a beautiful afternoon, nice and cool in the mountains, though the creek level was way down and the marshes were oddly devoid of the usual winged swarms--I can usually count on seeing iridescent gangs of damselflies, but found none.

We then drove south to the mall (utter contrast) in search of a decent floor lamp for my Lycoming office. There's a fairly old PC on my desk, and the screen flickers noticeably, but I think I can get used to that. I'm less accommodating toward the fluorescent lighting: I really do think that it triggers some of my headaches. I had one small table lamp left from the four-in-a-box we bought for my BU office, and someone left one of those little gooseneck desk lamps, which I set up on a shelf and adjusted to point up, but clearly a floor lamp was needed. After dragging R past every conceivable model at Lowe's, I settled on a basic brushed-chrome "3 light tree" for 25 bucks.

* * *

Keystone Chapbook update: The contest is down to ten finalists. I shipped these ten manuscripts to the final judge on Thursday. Since the manuscripts are identifiable only by log number (cover sheets, acknowledgments, and bio information were removed as each manuscript arrived), I was thinking I'd post the log numbers of the finalists here. I know that not everyone is going to check this blog, but it's a good way to show a public record of the process at this stage but maintain the privacy of the writers' identities. (Authors were e-mailed their manuscript numbers as they were logged, and I deleted those e-mails immediately upon sending them). Any advice? The judge has a month to select the winning manuscript (and two runners-up). If you submitted your manuscript, would you want to know at this stage whether it was still in the running?

* * *

The man is home from his morning jaunt. It's Sunday, and on Sundays we have migas. Yummy.