In my first week of studying Chinese writing,
I placed two horses beside two tigers
and the word careless formed.
With just five brushstrokes, I made an eye,
yet it took twelve for happiness,
eleven for success and fourteen for long life,
which I brushed on rice paper,
trying to master all the hooks and angles
of those difficult strokes. But then, writing English again,
for the first time since third grade I started to count
how many barely discernible movements my fingers make
guiding my favorite pen into broken cursive loops and crannies,
swirls and down strokes, up strokes, cross strokes
entering and leaving every sentence,
the anguished commas and dashes, the little ellipses
come out of their hiding places as if they were
pinpricks of honey at the end of clover spikes,
into this fine moving world.
And with such minute pleasures I was content
at the end of the day, which the Chinese might paint as rì-yuè,
or time passing in falling tones,
almost as beautiful as míng baí, to understand
those wonderful tiny crate characters,
that miniature broken ladder character,
the rising tones of sun, moon, clear-white, in two squares of sky.
"Do you think it a small thing, to know how to live?"
---St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux
The spring issue of Slow Trains has arrived just in time for the start of
the baseball season, and we happily welcome up to our literary plate new
poetry from Sherman Alexie, an essay on the soul of Johnny Cash from
John G. Rodwan, Jr., and great fiction about a little girl's desire to
disappear into the world of mermaids in O'ahu, along with two dozen
other new pieces from our favorite writers.
In Fiction:
Mermaid of O'ahu by J.L. Bramble
The happiest days were when we first moved to O'ahu, before the night that I was attacked by the giant sea mollusk.
The Naming of Fruit by Digby Beaumont
A memory comes up, of his mother when he was a young boy. Back then she loved to dance. Daniel would come home from school and find her in the kitchen, singing along and swaying to the music on the radio: Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole.
Friday Night at the Olympia Theater by Jean P. Moore
I took a breath and tried to hold my lips like a kiss, but I couldn’t really suck the chocolate milk up through the straw very well that way.
Emmitt Waves by Beau Midgett
I’m frequently asked to repeat my version of Emmitt’s departure, especially over beach bonfires. I don’t mind, a good surf tale never grows old.
My Wife’s Posse by Kyle Hemmings
When my wife and I make love, she is no longer consumed by passion. She lies stiff, as if awaiting a flogging. I imagine she wishes she was blindfolded. I imagine she wishes I was a handsome pirate who has kidnapped her and stolen her father's dowry.
Far Away From Here by Inderjeet Mani
Under the shadow of the Mammelles...you'll find that line in Baudelaire. He lived with the Autards right here, in that cottage over on the hill.
=======
In Essays:
Instructions on How to Build a Galaxy by Daniel Hudon
Listen to Rumi: Start a big, foolish project. No new galaxies have been constructed in the past fourteen billion years, but that's no reason for you not to build one. Once you've built a galaxy, you can do anything.
Solitary Man by John G. Rodwan, Jr.
Indeed, for the faithless, god songs like Johnny Cash’s can gain poignancy. When he says god reached down his hand or is calling, softly and tenderly, for you and me, he sincerely means it.
Monody for Matador by Stephenson Muret
I stepped out of the bus station's glass doors to witness an old man accidentally drop a small octopus in the street. He uttered a quiet oath.
======
In poetry:
The Seven Deadly Sins of Marriage by Sherman Alexie
We are word-whores / With libidos and egos of balsa wood / We'd have sex with our books, if only we could
Ruby Spotted Swallowtail by Nettie Farris
frequents groves and gardens / lives for citrus / lemon lime key-lime / pie and / an occasional Margarita
Dear Love by Robert Jacoby
You are lush like the Caribbean island jungle that June morning. Remember?
Remember that summer night in agra by Stephen Roxborough
my greedy lips swimming in light years / slowly curving round your heavens / tongue tripping across the zodiac / tasting each sign / of this perfect universe
For Adam by Lisa Cole
I heard a poem once / where the poet set two lovers on train tracks / making love. And they could not hear / the train coming straight for them
Postcard, Second Issue by Christina Manweller
Grapes on sale this week / one ninety-nine a pound / I bought two. Pounds, that is / What are you selling? / My grapes / they're rotting on the vine
A Matter of Preference by Howie Good
Wouldn’t you rather / we walk down / the avenues of rain / trading verses from Poe / like black roses
Orpheus and Eurydice: 2 letters by Deirdre Feehan
Red rumors rushed into my path with sharp grappling hooks: She found gold in Alta. She pitched to Barry Bonds. She rafted the Susquehanna, half way to China.
What's All This Stuff? by John Calvin Hughes
What do you want from me? / I was sure I locked the door / and now there you are / back in the closet, behind / the coats, rummaging / in the pockets, worrying / my new shoes
=====
On baseball:
Curveball Summer by Douglas Campbell
I wanted to throw the ball through Norman's fucking head, and I flung it at him as hard as I could. Just for the hell of it I tried spinning it too. And for the first time I saw that sucker curve.
The Golden Child of Red Sox Nation by Kim Girard
Kate doesn’t know it yet, but she’s part of Red Sox Nation. That she was born in a rural town in China some 7,000 miles away doesn’t matter.
If I were single, would I be thinner?
Do I overeat because I don't compete
With the flat-bellied bachelors? Or do we
Thick husbands look and feel thicker
Whenever our wives see a slender man?
Or does it matter? Of course, it matters.
I can't stick with any weight loss plan,
And though my extra twenty won't shatter
Any scales, I despise my love handles,
And often feel ugly and obese.
But my lovely wife always lights the candles,
Disrobes, and climbs the mountain called me,
Because wives can love beyond the body
And make mortal husbands feel holy.
Rave on John Donne, rave on thy Holy fool
Down through the weeks of ages
In the moss borne dark dank pools
Rave on, down through the industrial revolution
Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age
Rave on down through time and space down through the corridors
Rave on words on printed page
Rave on, you left us infinity
And well pressed pages torn to fade
Drive on with wild abandon
Uptempo, frenzied heels
Rave on, Walt Whitman, nose down in wet grass
Rave on fill the senses
On nature's bright green shady path
Rave on Omar Khayyam, Rave on Kahlil Gibran
Oh, what sweet wine we drinketh
The celebration will be held
We will partake the wine and break the Holy bread
Rave on let a man come out of Ireland
Rave on on Mr. Yeats,
Rave on down through the Holy Rosey Cross
Rave on down through theosophy, and the Golden Dawn
Rave on through the writing of A Vision
Rave on, Rave on, Rave on, Rave on, Rave on, Rave on
Rave on John Donne, rave on thy Holy fool
Down through the weeks of ages
In the moss borne dark dank pools
Rave on, down though the industrial revolution
Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age
Rave on words on printed page
Kay Ryan has recently been named our new Poet Laureate. She is
known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes.
Listen to her
read "The Edges of Time" here.
Hope
What's the use
of something
as unstable
and diffuse as hope -
the almost-twin
of making-do,
the isotope
of going on:
what isn't in
the envelope
just before
it isn't:
the always tabled
righting of the present.
Crystal checked her computer schedule, Al was in doing a procedure, and they had one more patient to see. Standing in front of her wall mirror, she pulled up her long, blond hair with a clip; curls cascaded down her back. "Breast Wishes" looped across her pink scrub top in white embroidered thread. She put some drops in her green eyes to take the red away and applied some pink lipstick to her collagen-stung lips. Her Monroe diamond stud flashed back at her on her cheek. Her phone vibrated, and she felt angry while reading the second text from her estranged husband, David.
Distracted by the message, Crystal just about tripped over a towering bin of cast off implants. She grabbed a silicone 600cc (DD) off the top.
Her flame-haired therapist was teaching her strategies to help her cope with general stress and the break-up of her marriage. Crystal laid the implant on the arm of her antique verdigris sofa and slipped her diamond ring off. Sitting on the sofa, she crossed her legs in a lotus position, closed her eyes, taking deep breaths. She identified her angry thoughts and visualized them floating through the air. Feeling somewhat detached and separated from her anger, she watched the words glide away from her. She was getting better at observing her emotions, outside of herself. She closed her eyes and visualized herself keeping her house, not worrying about work, and having a healthy relationship with a man she could trust. She released her thoughts into the universe.
Feeling calmer, she looked at the 600cc implant straddling the sofa arm.
It was Al's idea to keep the old implants she thought as though they were artifacts.
To compare the old to the new. Comparing -- saline vs. silicone; texture vs.
non-texture; teardrop vs. round; small vs. large. Even more choices than that.
New implants were superior to the old. The old ones got old and needed to be
replaced. Just like wives and everything else...
Here is Slow Trains author
Eric D Goodman reading "Cicadas" on NPR. It's about 10 minutes, including music
and sound effects (with the wonderfully evocative and slightly creepy sound of the
cicada invasion during a wedding).
I light up in bars. Get ideas. Like Ringo.
Who knew he’d composed more songs than Lennon-McCartney?
Problem was, he said, he couldn’t read his own handwriting in the morning.
Me, I’d kill for that collection...
In New York City for a conference
on weed control, leaving the hotel
in a cluster of horticulturalists,
he alone stops, midwestern, crewcut,
narrow blue tie, cufflinks, wingtips,
holds the door for the Asian woman
in a miniskirt and thigh high
white leather boots. She nods
slightly, a sad and beautiful gesture.
Neither smile, as if performing
a timeless ritual, as if anticipating
the loss of a son or a lover.
Years later, Christmas, inexplicably
he dons my mother's auburn wig,
my brother's wire-rimmed glasses,
and strikes a pose clowning
with my second hand acoustic guitar.
He is transformed, a working class hero
and a door whispers shut,
like cherry blossoms falling.
--Christopher Chambers
The winter issue of Slow Trains has glided
into place, with eight fabulous new short fiction pieces, including
J. Albin Larson's Noodling, an unforgettable tale
of teenage adventure in the St. Croix river:
"My dad had told me stories about going to the St. Croix, taking deep breaths and
diving down to the bottom of the river with his eyes open and arms outstretched, squinting
through the dark water and feeling around for a hole to stick his arm in, waiting for a fish to
come along. About the noodling tournaments they used to have in Stillwater, where the guy
who pulled out the biggest catfish would win $50 and a free All-You-Can-Eat at Dale's Fish Story Saloon.
He said that if you found the right hole, sometimes a catfish as big as a human would clamp down
on your forearm. That you had to fight underwater and be sure to push your legs off the bottom or you
might not be able to wrestle the huge fish to the surface. My mother always scolded him for telling those
stories. She said noodling was illegal because people died from trying it, although I had never heard that
from anyone else. Then she'd make my dad tell me I wasn't allowed to do it and if I ever did I wouldn't
be allowed near the water anymore.
Standing there along the shore with Kimbo, who looked like she wanted to try it, I was a little nervous..."
Other great fiction in this issue is by Catherine J.S. Lee,Tamara Linse, Eric D. Goodman, Tom Sheehan,
Jenny Dunning, Elizabeth Buechner Morris, and Rich Seeber .
Baseball poetry abounds just in time for spring training, from poets
David M. Harris, Michael Haeflinger, and Thomas Michael McDade. The baseball essay,
"Forty Years" by
Andrea Lewis considers the complete, coherent little world of baseball and its amazing
pull on us throughout our lives.
"Since I left Nigeria, my home country, in October 1994, my life has more or less been improvisatory.
Many close friends have enriched and still enrich my peripatetic existence. I have learnt to choose
my battles better; my battles against injustice, racism, provincialism, aggressive secularism, pomposity,
victim-ology, political myopia, cynicism, anti-intellectualism, artistic timidity, selfishness, fashionable joylessness,
militant patriotism..."
In new essays the first Middle Eastern film festival is covered by Jeff Beresford-Howe, the music of
train language is contemplated by Charmi Keranen, Brian Peters explains standing up for Obama in
Iowa, and Laurie Delaney recalls the unfortunate exact moment when she was no longer a kid.
A dozen elegant poets round out the issue, including Martin Willitts Jr., Mackey Q. Williams,
Brianna Lee, Jonathan Rutigliano, Heather A. McMacken, Carrie Friedman, Bill Roberts,
Mary Harwell Sayler, Anne Cammon, Satis Shroff, Marc Swan, Kristin Stoner, and
Kristine Ong Muslim.
So come keep warm with us reading the winter issue, and we'll be back soon with a
basketfull of spring
literary delights!
Susannah Indigo
Editor
Slow Trains
January 28, 2008
Here's Billy Collins on my how many diems you can carpe.....and the theme of poetry as death...
January 2, 2008
The new winter issue of Slow Trains will be arriving next week.... in the meantime, enjoy this
poem from American Life in Poetry, by Rynn Williams, a poet working in Brooklyn, New York.
Insomnia
I try tearing paper into tiny, perfect squares--
they cut my fingers. Warm milk, perhaps,
stirred counter-clockwise in a cast iron pan--
but even then there's burning at the edges,
angry foam-hiss. I've been told
to put trumpet flowers under my pillow,
I do: stamen up, the old crone said.
But the pollen stains, and there are bees,
I swear, in those long yellow chambers, echoing,
the way the house does, mocking, with its longevity--
each rib creaking and bending where I'm likely to break--
I try floating out along the long O of lone,
to where it flattens to loss, and just stay there
disconnecting the dots of my night sky
as one would take apart a house made of sticks,
carefully, last addition to first,
like sheep leaping backward into their pens.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine.
November 27, 2007
Watch John Mayer do an impromptu great live medley of his hit Waiting On The World To Change
and Alicia Keys‘ No One, at a small club.
November 12, 2007
“I remember the electric chill of my first June morning in Paris as I walked along the river, past vendors and painters
and busy quais, past the reflection of time past and passing time on gray-blue water and white boats carrying
tourists with sweaters and flashing cameras. I walked often, everywhere, eschewing the metro and the trains
and taxicabs. On my many walks near my quaint six-story hotel, I watched the skateboarders in the courtyard
off rue Saint Honoré, in the dusk and in the morning when the light was dim and comforting, and I marveled at
how it stayed light outside until eleven o'clock at night when the sun set in a cantaloupe haze over the wrinkled
Seine. I relished summer nights that felt like autumn, staying out late and shivering on the cold stone benches
near the glass pyramid at the Louvre, eating coconut ice cream and mango sorbet while watching the handsome
waiters at the Café Marly and the gendarmes on roller blades….."
Also come read new poems by Ellen Pober Rittberg, Bernadette McBride, Robert Warrington,
Jessy Randall , James Anderson, Leonore Wilson, John Brigh,t Ian C. Smith, Kimberly D. Robinson, and
a new chapbook from Martin Willitts , News From the Front.
...and learn how "baseball prepares you for the big things" from Tom Carlson's
Three Players. Three Fans, along with more great baseball writing from Christopher Justice,
Samuel Todd, Thomas Feeny, and Elizabeth Barrett.
Our fabulous fiction writers this issue include Donia Carey, Sarah Black, Tony R. Rodriguez, Michael Cocchiarale,
Nick Ostdick, Ann Tinkham, Katherine Luck, Ellen Pober Rittberg, and Angela Meyer.
New essays cover topics from Jack Kerouac to Henry Rollins to an environmental refuge, from writers
Robert Voris, John G. Rodwan, Jr., and Bill Gillard.
And...that's it, until the snowflakes swirl around our words in late December!
Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen,
prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers.
Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers,
he gazes forward to the city in the distance--always
the same bountiful smile upon his portly face.
Why don't I share his one-minded happiness?
The pear blossom, the crimson-petaled magnolia,
filling me instead with a mixture of nostalgia
and yearning. He's laughing at me, isn't he?
The seasons wheeling despite my photographs
and notes, my desire to make them pause.
Is that the lesson? That stasis, this holding on,
is not life? Now I'm smiling, too--the late cherry,
its soft pink blossoms already beginning to scatter;
the trillium, its three-petaled white flowers
exquisitely tinged with purple as they fall.
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
—William Stafford
July 31, 2007
I remember those first years of making love
in Chicago, Saigon, Santa Fe, Tucson,
Los Angeles, and a cliff in Mexico --
each time your hand was on my breast I would think: child child child.
It took a long while to get there –
I was 23, recovering from Danceteria, Palladium, Nell’s.
Only four years my senior, you sported a suit and a prodigious
mustache. You didn’t smoke and only drank two beers at a time.
So for five years we stole hallway flirtations, awkward non-dates,
and I’d complain about ramrod administrators and curmudgeonly colleagues,
those same professors who bellowed to you: “Marry Boltwoman already!”
The conspiracy extended to strangers. At an outdoor concert:
“Dear, you must marry a man who prepares you food.”
Chocolate dipped strawberries, taboule, humous, and wine.
But darling, we didn’t marry.
I ran away to New Mexico
with a suicidal long haired wannabe rocker,
even younger and more foolish than I....
......come read the rest of Julie Bolt's lovely poem in the new summer issue of
Slow Trains.
June 1, 2007
Sun!
Who was it named you
sun?
No one would be surprised,
I bet,
to see three letters in the sky
instead of your gold
face.
--Federico Garcia Lorca
April 30, 2007
Ah, spring -- new light & flowers & baseball & the fresh hope and relief that
arises for kids with the end of another school year in sight!
But what if the sight you saw was your heart swimming its very own laps, with attitude,
in the pool? Thus is the surreal yet wonderful premise of Marc Levy's
new story,
The Aquatist at Rest.
Other fabulous fiction in the new issue springs from Olivia Kate Cerrone, Sabrina Tom,
Randall Brown, Erica Russo, David Erlewine, and Brian Friesen.
From The Joy of the Blues to Pluto's planetary despair, poets this
spring include Nina Bennett, Alex Stolis, Michael Keshigian, Arun Gaur,
Leslie LaChance, Rob Plath, Antoinette Rainone, PJ Nights, Bob Bradshaw,
Gloria J. Bennett, John Eivaz, and Bryan Murphy.
In essays,
Felicia Swanson almost becomes a Russian citizen, and Mark Dursin dissects
the roads of Robert Frost...openly.
Baseball submissions overwhelm Slow Trains, as always, and for the spring issue
we start off with, what else? the 2007 Season Predictions
from our favorite baseball writer, Jeff Beresford-Howe. Following him up with baseball
poetry, essays, and fiction are Antoinette Rainone, Rob Kirkpatrick, Dean Ballard,
G Timothy Gordon, and Gerald Budinski.
And last but not least, a lovely chapbook from Larry D. Thomas,
who was recently appointed by the Texas Legislature as the 2008 Texas State
Poet Laureate, on the ever-popular spring subject of....
Eros. As he reminds us so beautifully of that ultimate sensual achievement -- "For years
the body's cells divide, just, one day, to reach it. Reached, it must be
reached over and over again, shackling the
body with ravishing iron, enslaving it to a habit the envy of heroin..."
We hope you visit Slow Trains spring issue
often, and that you have a fabulously fresh and poetic spring season, full of
hope and all sorts of achievements.
April is National
Poetry month -- celebrate by checking out a new poem each day ...... and of course come back to Slow Trains in the next week or
so to read our brand new spring issue, bursting with poems!
March 1, 2007
Here are some funny winners from the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (for the worst opening
line in a novel) --
Winner: Detective Fiction
"It was a dreary Monday in September when Constable Lightspeed came
across the rotting corpse that resembled one of those zombies from Michael
Jackson's "Thriller," except that it was lying down and not performing the
electric slide."
Winner: Romance
"Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing,
the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever
experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys
on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but
more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access
to an espresso machine."
"My name is Arun D'Silva. I am from Bombay. Can I fall in love with you?"
This was how he introduced himself to every girl. And it wasn't true. Though his name was Arun D'Silva, he wasn't from Bombay, but from Goa, and he didn't particularly want to fall in love. But whenever he saw any girl, whenever he gazed into a pair of large black eyes, he could think of nothing but love.
This time, he was on the crossover bridge at Church Gate Station, straddling the cement parapet and his legs swung on either side. Looking down, he spotted a woman on platform three, waiting for the train. She carried an orange leather handbag and the heel of her shoe tapped the platform. She hadn't heard his introduction, so he shouted again as loudly as he could. Her train arrived and the tapping stopped. He never saw her again, but felt the steam of the departing train against the soles of his feet.
The only woman Arun D'Silva saw on a regular basis but never addressed his question to was Mrs. Mathur, his landlady. He lived in a small off-shoot of the Dharavi slum, where people who had managed to partially pull themselves out of the Bombay muck had set up a community housing system. He occupied a closet-sized room, which used to be the store of Mrs. Mathur's 2-bedroom, ground-floor flat. But when Mrs. Mathur had found her mother dead, slumped on the ground, clutching a glass bottle of puffed rice, she immediately pronounced the room inauspicious and rented it out. Arun paid part of his rent by sweeping and mopping the open-air landing outside the house everyday by dawn, did some odd chores, and also paid a part in cash. He entered and exited his room through a small door that had once been a ventilation gap. Sometimes, when Mrs. Mathur knew that Arun hadn't eaten a square meal a day owing to lack of funds, she left him a plate of rice and dhal outside the door, and Arun showed his gratitude by buying with his own money a sheet of tin and fixed it as a door so as to give her some privacy. He was also very meticulous with his chores; he woke at dawn to complete the sweeping and mopping, fetched milk from the milkman, and ran to the corner shop for groceries before shutting his door and leaving for work.
Arun didn't have any close relatives, except for a great-aunt in Calcutta who he didn't think he had ever seen. Nevertheless, she sent him a parcel of home-made sweets every month. She owned two voluptuous, over-lactating cows that were housed in her garage. She was wealthy enough to own a car, but not a second garage, so the car had to stay parked out on the street. The cows together produced ten litres of milk a day, and the milk couldn't be thrown away as the cows were sacred, so milk sweets were constantly being prepared and distributed to various family members through out India, sometimes even to distant third cousins in London and Melbourne .
Arun kept the sweets, along with his other precious possessions, locked in a trunk and close to his bed pile
He ate one every three days, so the box lasted through the month...
I bring the cat's body home from the vet's
in a running-shoe box held shut
with elastic bands. Then I clean
the corners where she has eaten and
slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food
from the baseboard, dumping the litter
and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic
dishes I hide in the basement, the pee-
soaked towel I put in the trash. I put
the catnip mouse in the box and I put
the box away, too, in a deep
dirt drawer in the earth.
When the death-energy leaves me,
I go to the room where my daughter slept
in nursery school, grammar school, high school,
I lie on her milky bedspread and think
of the day I left her at college, how nothing
could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax
out from between her floorboards,
or taking a razor blade to the decal
that said to the firemen, "Break
this window first." I close my eyes now
and enter a place that's clearly
expecting me, swaddled in loss
and then losing that, too, as I move
from room to bone-white room
in the house of the rest of my life.
December 21, 2006
Redolence
I've awakened dizzy on a sun-blind morning,
a warm flush rising as I tuck my face closer to
the opened button of my flannel shirt
and inhale. That cinnamon,
that clove of him still enchanting
the dreamslide of skin between my
breasts, the poem of moan and whisper
repeating its sweet reek.
And I've traveled, sometimes forty years,
on molecules of the past
to sit before my mother's dresser
testing each glass decanter of amber scent,
or descending to Grampa's cellar
with its sour promise of crushed grapes
and dusty bottles waiting to be filled;
I can recall the fragrance of Gramma's powder
haunting my face after her goodbye kiss, Daddy's
Old Spice aftershave impossibly in the air
before they closed the casket lid.
Could I remember, then, back to my crib
and its honeyed milk, or even further back, to the
bassinet of culture where Tigris and Euphrates
caress date palm and lemon, where laughter
rings like camel bells and a caravan of aromas
beckons me home to a sweetwater oasis?
There I might share barleycake and lentil soup
with a group of desert peoples
someone dares to call my enemy.
"At the desk, I turn on my wie's vanity mirror lights because it's time to be a clown. Be a clown, be a clown.
All the world loves a clown, I'm singing. I pin on my wig made of yellow yak hair. Before I paint my face,
I remove dirt and oil from my face with witch hazel. Next, I cover my real eyebrows with eyebrow plastic. I
cover my face in clown white, being careful to leave my nose bare. I tear a couple pages from the back of the
vinyl padded guest services binder, and blot the excess with the room service page. My twin boys come in to watch.
They like this part because I dab the extra white on their cheeks. I need to make things fun for them now after
I lost the house, and everything inside it to the God damned IRS. No toys, no bikes. Not even a yard for them
to play in. Only a hotel room. But they don't care; they still love their Dad, especially when I'm a living clown.
They look forward to these days now, the days when I have to perform at a party. It doesn't even occur to them
I'm a qualified mathematician who got carried away in the heady days of the internet boom, and that I moved a
bunch of money, which the firm thought of as embezzlement......"
Check out this indictment of George Bush from Patti Smith's remarkable New Year's Eve performance of
the Declaration of
Independence.
July 13, 2006
right here, right now
The bright and shiny summer issue of Slow Trains is up -- come visit and read the finest of fiction, poetry, essays, a beautiful chapbook, Eduardo Santiago's Ten interview, and of course plenty of writing on baseball!
June 10, 2006
New Jersey
Pearl Jam, live:
Judging by the crowd in attendance at Pearl Jam’s back to back shows in Camden, New Jersey over Memorial Day weekend, the band is addressing their concerns to the same demographic rediscovered by Republicans and Democrats during the last presidential election: the young-middle aged, middle class, white male. Pearl Jam has always put politics at the forefront of their music, evolving from twenty-something alienation to forty-something responsibility, but are audiences listening to the words frontman Eddie Vedder is singing, or just the ecstatic sound of his voice?
Since the 1991 release of their first album, Ten, Vedder’s lyrics have delivered irony, rage, and scorching (albeit, at times, facile) critiques on topics ranging from mankind’s destruction of the environment (This land is mine, this land is free / I'll do what I want but irresponsibly) to the religious right’s hypocrisy (Got a gun, fact I got two / That's OK man, cuz I love God.) Pearl Jam’s latest album turns an eye towards the war in Iraq, deceit in the White House, and economic injustice, and the band demonstrated a tangible commitment to social issues by donating a dollar from every ticket sold for Saturday evening’s show to The Innocence Project, a not-for-profit working to exonerate the wrongly accused using DNA evidence. During the first encore, three men released from prison through the Project’s efforts were brought on stage to join the band in a rendition of the 1960’s hit, Last Kiss, and Vedder encouraged the cheering audience to think more critically about the justice system.
In the past, I had liked Pearl Jam’s music, though I wouldn’t consider myself much of fan. Seeing them perform gave me both a renewed respect for the group, and the desire to be more proactive in my own life—I wondered if other people were feeling that way too. While teams are almost always better than their weakest player, looking around I couldn’t help but feel the guy in front of me wearing a shirt claiming, “If You Lick It, They Will Come,” was somehow emblematic of the whole: an inebriated, testosterone-fraught, frat-boy type, whose patterns of consumption, feelings about gay marriage, and impressions of the Middle East will play a large role in shaping American policy over the next several decades. The good new is, if it seems the band faces an uphill battle in heightening social and political awareness among listeners, in 2000 their long-term fan base proved that audiences can be motivated when thousands of Pearl Jam fans voted for Ralph Nader, for whom Vedder campaigned.
After two encores, and phone calls to multiple cab companies which would not pick up passengers in Camden, a city considered by many the worst in the U.S., I eventually made it back over the Ben Franklin Bridge to Philadelphia to try a famous Philly cheese steak. As I approached the register at the restaurant I noticed a sign asking customers to remember Officer Daniel Faulker, “shot and killed by Mumia Abu-Jamal.” Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone still believed Mumia, who is probably the most famous political prisoner in the United States after the Rosenbergs, was actually guilty of killing a cop here in South Philly. I didn’t notice the second sign, admonishing customers to “Order in English, This is America,” until the girl across from me, who had also just come from the concert, pointed to it, exclaiming, “That’s so funny, I want a shirt that says that.”
Fiction takes us all the way from a ride on the night bus to Kampala
over to another tale from Michael Cocchiarale about the Ohio hopes and
dreams around the college campus of Clerestory. Other fiction
contributors in the winter issue include: Kelly DeLong, Kristen
Roupenian, Kyle Killen, Stephanie Nolasco, Victoria May Collett,
Richard Lutman, and Arnold Levine with a story about the head of
Karl Marx.
Essays flow from the Doobie Brothers, to grief, to African refugees
who have no word for snow, and a thoughtful "baseball" piece on the
significance of Willie Mays in our society. Essayists include Gail
South, Carrie Pomeroy, Kevin White, and Scott Mackey.
Poets this winter include Michael Keshigian, Bill Mehlman, Susan
Constable, Mary Paulson, Brent McCafferty, Philip W. Perna, Jessy
Randall, Brady Rhoades, Patrick Carrington, Terry Godbey, Fredrick
Zydek, Jane Olmsted, and last but not least the translations of Alex
Galper's poems from Russian, which leave us with this thought in his
poem on eating for world peace --
Withdraw your armies from Chechnya,
or I will finish this apple strudel
Allow gays to get married, or I am
ordering a cappuchino with cream...
We wish all readers the warmest of springs, to arrive very soon!
All of us at Slow Trains wish you and yours the happiest of holidays,
and a peaceful and wonderful coming new year. We will return with the brand new
winter issue of Slow Trains right around the first day of 2006!
Winner:Joan
Didion, The
Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred
A. Knopf) Finalists:Alan
Burdick, Out
of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Leo
Damrosch, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton
Mifflin) Jim
Dwyer and Kevin Flynn,
102 Minutes: The Untold Story of
the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin
Towers (Times Books) Adam
Hochschild, Bury
the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the
Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
(Houghton Mifflin)
POETRY
WINNER:W.S.
Merwin, Migration: New
and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon
Press) Finalists: John
Ashbery,
Where Shall I Wander (Ecco) Frank
Bidart, Star Dust: Poems
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Brendan
Galvin, Habitat: New and
Selected Poems, 1965-2005
(Louisiana State University Press) Vern
Rutsala,
The Moment’s Equation (Ashland
Poetry Press)
Traveling on the roads of America, we see the “Support Our Troops” ribbons on cars everywhere. Though all of us wish the men and women in the military well and want them to return home as soon as possible, we know there is another larger message that needs to be stated.
"Support Our Troops" does not mean support our war. The best way to support our troops is to question war itself. It is time the voices questioning war become stronger than those justifying war. We are the growing majority and the question is fundamental. Share this message and help create a collective voice at a critical time.
November 4, 2005
slow train,
i
lose count
of
the cars
when
the woman
blows
a kiss
SOMBER MILESTONE: After 2 1/2 years of war and the insurgency in Iraq, the toll of U.S. service members killed reaches 2,000. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq war inflicts heavy casualties on older, experienced troops.
Jim Weber, a veteran of World War II, and the Bay Area chapter of Veterans for Peace observe the group's 2,000-candle vigil at Lake Merritt's Lakeside Park in Oakland to honor the Iraq war dead.
We are delighted to announce that one of our favorite contributors,
Eduardo Santiago, has sold his first novel, "Tomorrow They Will Kiss,"
which will be published by Little, Brown, and Co. next July (2006).
Eduardo reports that the editor at Little, Brown, contacted him
because he read his stories online in Slow Trains. We'll look forward
to featuring Eduardo in "The Ten" mini-interview next summer when his
book comes out, and we offer him the heartiest of congratulations!
Slow Trains' autumn issue arrives with the falling leaves and fading
light -- though here in Colorado all of this means ski season is right
around the corner, which makes us embrace the colder days! The new
issue travels intensely from the pearling coast of Australia to
Cambodia to Iraq to Old Delhi, then spins right back to the mystery of
the giant black hole in one young boy's backyard.
Our new fiction writers include Monica Kilian, Marc Levy, Joe Dugan,
Brian K. Crawford, M. Stefan Strozier, Thomas E. Howard, Robert F.
Bradgford, J.A. Tyler, Tom Sheehan, Joseph Hegwood.
The fall baseball section is full of poetry and fiction, along with an
essay on the obsessions of a season ticket holder. Contributors
include J. R. Salling, Michael Schein, Tom Meek, Michael Ceraolo, and
Brian Reynolds.
Poetry also overflows in this issue, from: Lee Passarella, Gary
Charles Wilkens, Howard Good, Mary Bast, Paul Perry, Carl Leggo,
Christopher Barnes, P.J. Nights, A. Michael McRandall, Mark Gaudet,
Jack Conway, Jim Ellis, Greg Braquet, Amitabh Mitra, and Bob Bradshaw.
"...I may never get through the list of great books I want to read. Forget about bad ones, or even moderately good ones. With Middlemarch and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the world, a person should squander her reading time on fashionably ironic books about nothing much? I am almost out of minutes! I'm patient with most corners of my life, but put a book in my hands and suddenly I remind myself of a harrowing dating-game shark, long in the tooth and looking for love right now, thank you, get out of my way if you're just going to waste my time and don't really want kids or the long-term commitment. I give a novel thirty pages and if it's not by that point talking to me of till-death-do-us-part, then sorry, buster, this date's over."
- Barbara Kingsolver, "What Good is a Story?"
September 7, 2005
Salzburg
"During my recent trip to Salzburg, I went out to the tiny town of Steinbach, in the spectacular lake-and-mountain region of Salzkammergut, to see Gustav Mahler's composing hut. There are, in fact, three Mahler composing huts — in Steinbach, Maiernigg (to the south, on the Wörthersee), and Toblach (now Dobbiaco, in Italy). This is the one where the big man wrote much of his Second Symphony and drafted his Third..."
Kim Addonizio's first novel, Little Beauties, is now available -- it's a beautiful read
about a woman with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, a former child beauty-pageant competitor (rate
me, rate me!), and the challenges she faces.
More info:
From Booklist
Addonizio writes with sultry candor about womanhood under duress in her celebrated poetry, collected most recently in What Is This Thing Called Love? (2004). She now extends her provocative inquiry with verve and creative license in her first novel. Diana loves her job at a Long Beach baby store, but she is beginning to detect the contamination that haunts her. A former child pageant star pushed mercilessly by her man-crazy, alcoholic mother, Diana is a compulsive washer. Her obsessive behavior has driven away her husband, and she can't imagine how she can possibly give shelter to Jamie, a 17-year-old unwed mother, and her newborn, Stella, who desperately need a place to stay because Jamie's mother insists that she give Stella up for adoption. Addonizio writes with mesmerizing realism about Diana's efforts to conquer her neurosis and Jaime's conflicted motherhood, then turns to tongue-in-cheek fantasy to convey Stella's predicament as an old soul trapped in an infant's helpless body. The result is a funny, insightful, and diverting tale of high anxiety, rocky mother-daughter relationships, and the tyranny of the body. --Donna Seaman
"All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes."
--Tom Waits
And with that wonderful quote provided to us in Andrew Madigan's story
"The Shailah," Slow Trains arrives for the heat of the summer with
some wonderful humor running through the issue, along with stories
about frogs and dangerous diving and the compromises of older love.
Fiction this summer travels from Dubai to VietNam to an elementary
school full of sub-baiting kids to a red state with Lucy Wheat-Thin.
Contributors include Shane Alan Noecker, Darrryl Halbrooks,
Timothy Reilly, David Alexander McFarland, Hareendran Kallinkeel,
Wayne Scheer, Arndt Britschgi, and Andrew Madigan.
Richard Ammon's continuing series on gay life around the world lands
us in Egypt this summer, with his in-depth look at a challenging
lifestyle there:
Baseball! it's the season -- memoirs, poetry, and a doomed trip
with a girlfriend who hates baseball entertain us, from contributors
Robin Slick, Alan Berecka, Ed Markowski, D.E. Fredd, and Jonathan Hayes.
Poets this summer include Tim Bellows, S.E. Rindell, Vanessa Kittle,
Patrick Carrington, Kelley White, Amber Clark, Lisabet Sarai, John
Eivaz, and Jonathan Hayes.
The summer chapbook, Pencil Sketches, is from Ashok Niyogi,
full of poems that reflect his love for Russia and its people --
remembering the seasons, the windowpanes, the naked trees, the
snowflakes in the dawn...from Murmansk to St. Petersburg by sleeper train.
Mary Anne Mohanraj, whose new book, "Bodies in Motion," an exploration
of sexuality, marriage, and Sri Lankan/American immigrant concerns,
has just been released, answers our Slow Trains Ten" questions.
The editors at Slow Trains wish you a bright and fun-filled summer
season, and always look forward to receiving your comments about
our journal.
"Everything I think about the nature of this life comes down to seven words: "Everything is connected; everything changes; pay attention." And really, you only need the last two -- if you’re paying attention, you’ll find out whatever else you need to know."
Rain, rain, the monk is at rest
Lovers embracing on top of the world
April 20, 2005
San Francisco
Mark Morford's 14 Thoughts For The New Pope:
...You know what we wanted? More sex. Love. Good TV. Gender freedom. Better wine. Less sneering doctrine and homophobia and sexism and more fun with condoms and music and spiritual joy. But, instead, we got you....
1) You read it right: Endorse condoms. Crazy, isn't it? But this is what millions were hoping for. Condoms and birth control and finally allow your miserable, repressed priests to get married and have sex so as to avoid mental breakdown and spiritual angst and gross pedophilic urges. Hold to the Old Ways on this topic, Benedict, and you'll simply become even more archaic and silly and disrespected to the point where no one of the independent-minded and especially female persuasion anywhere in the world will have any respect for what you stand for. I am so not kidding...
"Listening to Bellow, I became intellectually happy -- an effect he was soon to have on a great many other writers of our generation. We were coming through. He was holding out for the highest place as a writer, and he would reach it. Even in 1942, two years before he published his first novel, Dangling Man, his sense of his destiny was dramatic because he was thinking in form, in the orbit of the natural storyteller, in the dimensions of natural existence. The exhilarating thing about him was that a man so penetrating and informed should be so sure of his talent for imaginative literature, for the novel, for the great modern form..."
"Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself." --Zen saying
Slow Trains' spring issue arrives with the light, full of blues and
wisdom from Kim Addonizio in our Slow Trains Ten interview...and alsofull of the magic of sentences, music, love, and colors from
many other writers, including:
In fiction: Shellie Zacharia, Boris Tsessarsky, Erin Dionne,
Chloe Noland, Elizabeth Christopher, Tripp Reade, and Christopher
Tolian
In Essays: Patrick Rasmussen's youthful "carport baseball league",
and Martin Hill Ortiz's graceful thoughts on which is the greatest
sentence ever written.
In poetry: Erin Noteboom, Tim Bellows, Michael Estabrook, Phoebe
Kitanidis, Andrea L. Boyd, P.J. Nights, John Eivaz, Peter Montfort,
Kelley White, Rebecca Kiernan, Bob Bradshaw, Ken Harrelson, and Papa
Osmubal.
Our spring chapbook, Roomful of Navels, comes from Craig R.
Kirchner, with his contemplation of mondo Zen, irresistible women,
and that whimsical fellow Work Ethic, all in a pink haze of
holiness, surrounded by hundreds of drawings of navels, no two quite
alike:
We round out the spring issue with original artwork from Jason
Black, Joel Nethery, and John A. Thompson.
The editors at Slow Trains wish you a fresh and peaceful spring
season!
Another reason why the Web is a miraculous place: Check out Saturn's aurora dancing, Venus in transit, infant stars, a flight over the Himalayas,
and more, in easy-to-view clips from the The Nasa/ESA Hubble Space Telescope - Video archive Hall of Fame
February 22, 2005
Winter solitude --
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.
"Gregory Corso came out of Vesuvio one night when it closed at 2 a.m. He broke the window of City Lights and went in and got cash out of the cash register. He got maybe $75 or $100, maybe $200, I don't know. People at Vesuvio called the police. The police came and dusted for prints and they got his prints. We went around to see him early in the morning. We told him that the police had his prints and he'd better leave town. So he did. He went to Italy and didn't come back for several years. We just didn't pay his royalties for a couple of years..."
Fiction contributors include: Michael P. McManus, Rich Hallstrom,
Diane Payne, Tanya Underwood, George Sparling, Christopher, and
Chirstopher Tolian.
In poetry we have: Uma Asopa, Matthew Gleckman, Alan Jude Moore, Chris
Kornacki, Jack Conway, Susan Snowden, Jessy Randall, Carmen Lupton,
Craig Kirchner, and Christine Allen-Yazzie.
Essays and baseball writers include: Erin Anderson, Jacob Sackin,
Megan Doney, and Walter Maroney.
We wish you a happy and peaceful new year, and hope you are always
discovering many of your own small beautiful things in the chaos of
our world.
Fiction contributors include: Michael P. McManus, Rich Hallstrom,
Diane Payne, Tanya Underwood, George Sparling, Christopher, and
Chirstopher Tolian.
In poetry we have: Uma Asopa, Matthew Gleckman, Alan Jude Moore, Chris
Kornacki, Jack Conway, Susan Snowden, Jessy Randall, Carmen Lupton,
Craig Kirchner, and Christine Allen-Yazzie.
Essays and baseball writers include: Erin Anderson, Jacob Sackin,
Megan Doney, and Walter Maroney.
We wish you a happy and peaceful new year, and hope you are always
discovering many of your own small beautiful things in the chaos of
our world.
Susannah Indigo
Editor
December 7, 2004
the Pacific
Mark Helprin's new book, The Pacific and Other Stories is a simply amazing book of short fiction. It not only has probably the best baseball story ever written, "Perfection", it is also filled with 15 other terrific stories, including a 9/11 redemption tale, stories set in wonderful exotic locales, and profound moments of loss, regret, redemption, and light.
November 29, 2004
London
from an interesting interview with Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body):
There is a yarn about Winterson involving saucepans. In 1997, to much attendant media moistness, she divulged that, when she first arrived in London as a boyish twentysomething, she serviced frustrated married women from the Home Counties in hotel rooms off Knightsbridge and Sloane Square. Having minimal access to the hard stuff, they paid her in Le Creuset.
The hilarity - of the story, of the telling of the story - tickles her still. " That was funny. It got blown up out of all proportion, but it was such a good story!" The kernel is true, she concedes, before adding, tantalisingly, "and I do have an awful lot of pans. Even now, if we get a big one with risotto stuck to the bottom, I say to Peggy, 'You've no idea how hard I had to work for that, and look what you've done to it...' - and I get biffed. It got all dressed up as lesbian prostitution, which it really wasn't. It was simply to do with a very strange and particular time which couldn't happen now, with ladies leading double lives. I was very young. They just wanted to buy me presents, and I needed cookware."
Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
"I like all my books because I sit on them until I'm ready. Nickel Mountain took me 20 years to write. I worked on it some every year all that time. I worked on it until I just couldn't see it anymore, and then I would put it away in a drawer for a while and when it got so I could handle it again I would go back and write some more. By the time I was through I had rewritten that thing hundreds of times. I had episodes which I had introduced and then taken out. I'd changed characters and changed all the names. By the time I was through I had really gone over that thing. It was one polished jewel."
Drop a glass of water today and see if the ceiling gets wet. Ask a question to a brick wall and see if you get an answer. Try fighting City Hall.... it's a world turned upside-down. Carrot Top is funny today. Cats are chasing dogs, kids begging for liver. See if you can pick up a railroad car. Look for the sunset in the east. Ask Beyonce for a date. You just don't know anymore...
October 21, 2004
proof of God's existence?
One of the things you grew up simply knowing is true is now false. A baseball team that falls behind 3-0 in a seven-game series can come back and win it after all. It's been done.
And it's been done by the Boston Red Sox, geniuses at finding ways to lose in October. And it's been done to the New York Yankees, who don't suffer epic collapses but cause them, who collect championships like pennies.
Drop a glass of water today and see if the ceiling gets wet. Ask a question to a brick wall and see if you get an answer. Try fighting City Hall....
.....it's a world turned upside-down.
Carrot Top is funny today. Cats are chasing dogs, kids begging for liver. See if you can pick up a railroad car. Look for the sunset in the east. Ask Beyonce for a date. You just don't know anymore... (Read the rest at Salon.)
Small joke of the day:
What's the difference between Vietnam and Iraq?
Bush had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.
Several months ago I published a review on Counterpunch,
describing David Ray
Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor, a book compiling the many questions concerning
9/11
left unanswered by the official version. You might want to look at
this if
such material is new to you.
Since then, I've been beseiged with email commentary, including two
short
stories concerning imagined events of that day and that time. These
triggered for me the idea of a collection of such writing -- an
anthology
entitled 9/11 Fictions.
Anyone interested in submitting a story concerning any aspect of the
event?
I suspect we could easily sell a good collection, especially if Bush is
re-elected. There are many memoir-type, "I was there" stories and
poems
that have been published, so what would be most interesting here is to
look
through the lens of the imagination.
If interested, please send anything already written, or let me know if
you
plan to write one. I'll be making a decision this fall about
whether there is critical mass to go ahead with the project. Anyone
interested in co-editing would also be welcome.
Claire Tristram, author of the highly-acclaimed novel, "After," a
story of an intense love affair between two people whose lives
have been forever altered by terrorism, joins us in the Slow Trains
Ten, answering the ten questions we always want to know about
writers and their creativity...and she's defninitely the first writer
we've interviewed to tell us the exact date she first started writing!
New fall fiction contributors include: Michael Cocchiarale, Kate
Heartfield, Paul Germano, Rich J. Stone, Utahna Faith, Sieannen Bell,
Kevin P. Keating, Naomi Leimsider, and a special childhood baseball
story from Zack Pelta-Heller.
There's a room full of glittering ladies awaiting you in Catherine
Daly's provocative poem, "On Watching The Bachelor." Other fall poets
include Christopher Cokinos , Amanda Auchter, Harold Janzen, Michael
Internicola, P.J. Nights, Chris Spradley, John Eivaz, L.E.
Fitzpatrick, Taylor Graham, Lori Williams, and Bob Bradshaw .
New things coming soon -- Slow Trains Volume III in print will be out
later this fall; our Pushcart Prize nominations are being considered
and will be announced in October; and we have finally started
building a new permanent books link page to help promote the works of
so many of our wonderful writers.
Native Joy for Real is Joy Harjo's long awaited CD release, her first since the award-winning Poetic Justice CD, Letter From the End of the Twentieth Century, from Silver Wave Records in 1997. This project marks a shift in musical style and accomplishment, from a native dub jazzy-reggae spoken word to a song-chant-jazz-tribal fusion. Harjo's voice has been compared by early reviewers of the preview CD to Suzanne Vega or Sade. Her saxophone sound has matured. Native Joy for Real is now available on Harjo's own label, Mekko Records.
September 21, 2004
Sell your cleverness
and purchase bewilderment
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.
--Rumi
September 13, 2004
In Japan, 1,000 paper cranes has become a worldwide symbol of peace, demonstrating the power of a single person to create change. According to Japanese myth, the gods will grant the wish of one who folds 1,000 paper cranes...
I adore Patti Smith -- I'd like to come back in my next life as
a mix of her...and maybe Bjork. If you join her mailing list at pattismith.net,
you get emails like this below, which make you click through, wonder if you ever knew what exactly 'souvenance' might mean, start looking
up h.p. lovecraft (no caps, please, we're arty!)...and on and on.
from pattismith.net:
greetings
well, we are reaching the last leg of our western swing,
via tour bus. we have slept in our berths, sat reading
in venue parking lots, traipsed the local beaches like
happy bums, done our work, done a benefit for the
henry miller library, and visited tor house. tor house
was built by the poet robinson jeffers and
is perched above the sea. the house remains as he
left it and i was lucky enough to photograph his
spectacles which curiously resembled my own.
i spent my afternoon off in sacramento penning
a souvenance for h.p. lovecraft. it is still up as i
just I can't bare to see it go. you still have time to
visit and catch a rare glimpse of our hero grinning.
i got to get back to work. i am researching the late,
great walt kelly, creator of pogo. he is next on my list.
i forgot to mention that a sparrow shat on my head
in ventura. i have been well assured this is very good
luck. so i share my good luck to all. now i must mosey
on. i got to get my clothes out of the sink and hang
them in the sun.
all good wishes
patti smith
--si
August 21, 2004
Krakow, Poland
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a
strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in
the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves,
well born,
Derived from people, but also from
radiance, heights.
Poets & Writers is accepting submissions for the ninth annual Amy Awards, a competition open to women age thirty and under who live in the New York City metropolitan area and on Long Island. Contestants are required to submit three lyric poems of up to fifty lines each, a SASE, and a brief biography to Poets & Writers, 72 Spring Street, New York, NY, 10012. There are no applications, guidelines, or fees; the deadline is September 15, 2004.
Winners will receive an honorarium, books, and a reading at Guild Hall in East Hampton with guest poet Diana Chang in November.
The Amy Award was established by Paula Trachtman and Edward Butscher of East Hampton in memory of Amy Rothholz, an actor and poet who died at age 25. Ms. Rothholz lived in New York City and summered in Amagansett.
--si
August 4, 2004
at the movies
The Door in the Floor, which is currently playing at art houses, is an absolutely gorgeous, erotic work of art. Amazing performances by Jeff Bridges, Kim Bassinger, and Mimi Rogers, with plenty of nudity, humor, tension, and sadness all mixed together -- this is the first third of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year adapted for the screen. A marriage falls apart after a tragedy, while their darling little girl watches (another haunting performance, she breaks your heart); a teenager comes on the scene and falls in love with Kim Bassinger; Jeff Bridges wanders around naked playing/working at writing and art while fumbling at life; and the storytelling from the photos of times gone by is breathtaking. It's a perfect blend of grief and laughter, mystery and illumination, and definitely not to be missed.
--Susannah Indigo
July 25, 2004
New York City
From Martha Rhodes, publisher of Four Way Books:
Please help convince Publishers Weekly that they should continue reviewing poetry. They have decided to stop reviewing in the Forecast section. Pls read the following. Contact info is included. The following is from Jeffrey Lependorf, Executive Director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Small Presses.
Dear Friends of Poetry: Some of you may already have heard that Publishers Weekly has decided to cease offering a Forecast review section dedicated to poetry. I spoke with Michael Scharf, the Poetry Forecast Editor, who confirmed the news; I then spoke with Jeff Zalesky, the Editor of the Forecast section, to find out exactly what is going on.
Jeff confirmed that there will no longer be a dedicated Forecast for poetry. They do not intend to offer a press release or formal statement to this effect, either. He did make a point of saying that they will "not be giving up on poetry." According to Jeff, they will still offer reviews of poetry titles, though these will only amount to 2-4 reviews a month. The reviews will most likely concentrate on "bigger name" poets, and PW will continue its policy of not reviewing first books. Jeff says that they do still plan to periodically present a special section of the Forecast devoted to poetry.
He gave multiple reasons for this decision, which were primarily bottom line-related. He stated that he has to put his "resources where the subscribers ask for them--and that's not poetry." He went on to say that because so many of the big stores and chains now have people dedicated to poetry, and there is so much readily-accessible online commentary about poetry, that the "PW reviews have become redundant." He also acknowledged that poetry makes up a very small base in terms of their advertising revenue.
Certainly we believe that PW has made a bad, "penny-wise, pound-foolish" decision. Here are some recommendations we have toward convincing them to reinstate the Poetry Forecast:
1) Direct letters/emails to Jeff Silesky expressing your disappointment in light of PW's historical support of the independent press community can't hurt. I don't believe that complaints or expressions of anger from you will have a tremendous effect, but you should make the importance of PW reviews to you known. Jeff made a point of saying to me that he had "hardly heard form anyone." (On the contrary, Mike Scharf did hear from many of you, but it is clear that this is not his decision.)
2) More importantly, I believe that if Jeff Zalesky hears from his constituents--namely, booksellers and librarians--this may have a much greater effect. Urge booksellers and librarians that you have a relationship with to contact PW to reinstate the Poetry Forecast.
Here's is the contact for Jeff Zalesky:
Jeff Zalesky, Forecasts Editor
Publishers Weekly
jzaleski@reedbusiness.com
-
July 16, 2004
Denver
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
-si
July 9, 2004
Helsinki, Finland
i want to be your dog
i want to be your enemy
i want to be your pudding
i want to be your meat
i want to be
your rock, your moss, your bass guitar
your snow, your melt, your free delivery
i want to be
a drop of honey on your lips
and the man with the licorice guns
on my hips
i want to be your mellow bend
your wriggling's end
your reason
your sin
your blueberries.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
As this April's "Poetry Month" comes to an end, here are a few of the extraordinary videos available at Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site, with the poems both read and talked about by those who submitted them:
Nick and the Candlestick,
by Sylvia Plath, read by a photographer who is an immigrant from Jamaica, and who considers his discovery of this poem his entry into the world of art.
Casey at the Bat,
read by an eleven year old boy who learned to read from baseball cards.
-si
April 26, 2004
Belgium
The Tao insists the Tao cannot be known -- just as the stone is coy regarding its core. The bridge which links the island to the mainland also insists on separateness and needs to be seen as such. Yet how could this concern him -- he with but one defiant concern, to waken the bird of poetry and break the limitations of the world.
"Writers of the past had absinthe, whiskey, or heroin. I have Google. I
go there intending to stay five minutes and next thing I know, seven
hours have passed, I've written
Rave On: postcards from Slow Trains
Opus has always wanted to fly
He approaches her, trailing his whole fortune,
“I remember the electric chill of my first June morning in Paris as I walked along the river, past vendors and painters
and busy quais, past the reflection of time past and passing time on gray-blue water and white boats carrying
tourists with sweaters and flashing cameras. I walked often, everywhere, eschewing the metro and the trains
and taxicabs. On my many walks near my quaint six-story hotel, I watched the skateboarders in the courtyard
off rue Saint Honoré, in the dusk and in the morning when the light was dim and comforting, and I marveled at
how it stayed light outside until eleven o'clock at night when the sun set in a cantaloupe haze over the wrinkled
Seine. I relished summer nights that felt like autumn, staying out late and shivering on the cold stone benches
near the glass pyramid at the Louvre, eating coconut ice cream and mango sorbet while watching the handsome
waiters at the Café Marly and the gendarmes on roller blades….."
Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen,
