Dreams of Ondaatje (1)

I want you to think about this:

Bearhug
by Michael Ondaatje

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks to me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?



________________________________________________________________________________________

(it feels, almost, as if I shouldn't write anything after this poem - I don't want to topple it - all that quiet Ondaatje sets up, all that daily real somehow both broadened & shattered by the movements & questions of this poem. I mean, fuck. This isn't typical of Ondaatje, this type of daily. There's one other poem I can think of, To A Sad Daughter, that carries anything close to this sense of the casual. Ondaatje's work is usually lush, lyrical, sensual. He's one of my very favorite authors & I (believe that I) have avoided writing about him here since there's simply too much to say. Let's call this post Dreams of Ondaatje, #1, in which we're simply to notice how sensitively & deliberately Ondaatje is balanced within the spectrum of emotion. The spectrum of emotion is an idea that came from Terrance Hayes - we were talking about some poems I'd shown him that discussed a difficult matter. He pointed out places where my adjectives tipped the poem towards sentimental, which is one side of the spectrum of emotion, the other side being, perhaps, cynicism. Now Ondaatje's poem is a parent's poem, any parent, maybe every parent. It's also specifically a father & son poem (if you're in the mood for a tangent, go look at Roethke's My Papa's Waltz & think about how poetry gives fathers & sons a new way to understand their physical relationship. Or something like that.) Back to the point, the question - How is it that Ondaatje doesn't make this a poem we roll our eyes at? How does he lead it away from sentimentality i.e. how does he manage to find conflict & questions within a situation as innocuous as bedtime? ... I have my own theories. #1 is : because he's fucking brilliant. #2 is a great deal longer. But these questions are for you, chickadees. Some questions for your brains to munch on. As for me, it's back to packing up my apartment. Beginning my drive to Houston on Tuesday. Stay tuned for Dreams of Ondaatje #2...

for a world slowly happening

Tomorrow is the grand finale of Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series & my last reading in Pittsburgh until who knows when.

With Lisa Alexander
Jill Khoury, Jason Irwin,
Fred Peterson, Kayla Sargeson.
Open Mic to Follow.

Hemingway's
3911 Forbes Avenue (in Oakland)
Free & open to the public / Jimmy Cvetic hosts.

Break Upwards

In an attempt to give myself a break from freaking out, by which I mean packing my apartment for next week's move to Houston, here's a few thoughts about the Tinhouse Summer Writer's Workshop, which I was at last week in Portland, OR. The website describes the program as a "One-week Writing Intensive"- I might describe it as simply a one-week intensive. After attending the Juniper Summer Writing Institute last year, I was fairly certain that I knew what to expect : a spartan living environment (read: plastic mattresses), daily provocative workshops & lectures, lots of time alone, walking in circles alone, lots of reading & writing. Tinhouse was quite different though - I spent more time rattling around in my brain than I expected, read a bit less. Last year, I was able to digest information quickly, maybe.. maybe there was less of ME in the front of my brain. Maybe last year, I had less at stake. The poems I brought to the table this year are poems that I haven't been able to write, that I've been trying to write for awhile now - poems about grief, about HIV, about disease. Poems with a sense of urgency, not just narrative works that I believe are needed in our culture, written with a desire to reach a specific type of audience. This new stuff - I don't know - perhaps this stuff is the first real urgency I've understood- confessional work knit closely a sense of wanting to save someone, or something, as soon as possible. This work is insistent, it has energy - not the dull ache that maybe I became used to writing from.

I don't believe in writer's block. Either I'm writing, or I'm not. It's been rare that I beat myself up for not writing, though in the past few years I've occasionally been tossed into crisis when realizing that I haven't written in awhile. I can never blame that on writer's block though, I blame it on getting involved with other things - relationships, recovery, television, exhaustion - but it's never some vague outside force, or a type of black hole in my brain that keeps me from writing. Writing is only alwys something I'm choosing to leave time for, or not. Even when I leave time for it, sometimes it doesn't happen - leaving that time open is the important thing. I wrote bizarre, bizarre linked poems last week at Tinhouse - a reflection on a terrible, dilapidated house I used to live in, another about the crazy Chinese man who sort of lived outside of that house in the bushes, and another that was more generally philosophical about what it meant to live in an environment like that, what happened to my identity & value system there. A few random poems also came out - one influenced by that Black-Eyed Peas song SHUT UP (Yes, I'm serious.) and another sort of about being on the Oregon coast - that place simultaneously quenched some thirst & opened hunger's trap door.

Back to the boxes, the bags & goodbyes...
Something more substantial soon..

..with no anchorage of values...

My third tattoo

Liminality. From the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold." The fear-driven part of my brain wants, what-- reliability, regularity, permanence, unconditional love, something to stick to. An old lover's father once had to cling to the railing of a walkway, so convinced was he that gravity had somehow lost it's rules, a kind of reverse vertigo. I would be remiss if I didn't say that I had the same feeling - Time is fairly meaningless, relationships are fairly meaningless. This is not to say that I don't care. Caring does not give a thing meaning.

This morning I walked around the Reed campus weeping uncontrollably for absolutely no reason until, crossing a bridge, I encountered a man lovingly holding a duck, cradling the bird in both hands. I hadn't been prepared for this interruption of painful & inspecific self-involvement. "Just my morning activity," said the man, passing me. He walked to the edge of the bridge and held the duck over the railing, then tossed it into the sunny air. "Fly, Harold!" he said. Etheridge would probably say that this means nothing. This is what he said yesterday (admittedly, in jest) when I told him that a cat ran up to me and walked beside me for a block and a half. Still, whether or not he made the comment in jest, it was true - desiring meaning does not give a thing, an event, meaning.

I suppose you can not really "give" anything at all meaning. One can invest meaning in anything -- a particular date, a glass bottle, a view from a a hill, a necklace. But the thing, the place, the event is entire within itself i.e. the specific,personal meaning you've endowed this thing with cannot be parsed out by others unless, perhaps, there is a clear signpost. A church, for example, has a more general meaning for a wider population, as does a grocery store, or a gun. Perhaps material things have more of a built-in meaning, a use, a purpose. Perhaps this is why our culture has become so INTENSELY materialistic : without surrounding ourselves with things designated for specific uses and purposes i.e. constructed (albeit, superficial) meanings, we are left with - what? Natural things. A dog, a bush, the moon, a fish. And what does it mean to watch clouds against the moon? What does it mean to watch the seamless V of birds carry themselves over the ocean?

Hey, Liminality. Hey, Void.

That's where the anchor comes in.
Don't ask me what it means.

swiftly now,

... because that past month has been a complete tornado -- some summer enjoyment, some beautiful & fantastic experiences, and some getting hit on the head with the leg of a table caught in the wind; some moments of "Wow, how'd I get so high above ground! Woo hoo!", some moments of "Wow, ouch, great, I'm glad that I just broke all my ribs falling from that height." Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about:

1. Discovery of Robyn & how she dances:






2. 'Tis the season for Bubble Tea!



I love bubble tea like my cat loves french fries: crazy love. In Boston, I used to live near what I can only describe as an Asian superstore, with a grocery store that sold everything from fresh fish to ornate tea pot sets, that also had a huge food court in the front. The proximity of this superstore to my abode enabled a diet I like to call the whiskey-bubble tea-coffee-cigarettes diet. Thankfully, this diet was short-lived. My love for bubble tea was enhanced a year later by a summer job at Dado Tea in Harvard Square. My days looked like this: Wake. Coffee. Bike. Bubble Tea. Work. Bubble Tea. Bike. Go to second job at T.T the Bear's. (I am getting a little nostalgic about Boston here... forgive the tangent...)

Now, bubble tea is not a food group. It is a delightful, occasional treat from my favorite neighborhood Thai place, The Green Mango Noodle Hut. Three cheers for Bubble Tea. (p.s. if you are ever in Boston, please check out these linked places. You will be happy you did)

3. My move to Houston is immanent. This means that my apartment is in total chaos. I am trying to find good adoptive parents for my 10+ house plants, pack three large bookcases into cardboard boxes, weed out all of my winter clothes, throw away shoes full of holes that I kept hoping would magically be healed, figure out what to do with my furniture since I am not taking any with me, figure out when & what bed I would like to have delivered to the apartment I am not yet 100% sure that I have in Houston. Yesterday I cried, in public, at the mall. And I have been staying up insanely late trying not to sift through all the photographs & love letters of the past freakin' decade. And this is just a small glimpse of what's happening. Madness, I tell you.


Fortunately, in all this mess, I have friends like Jason Kirin who absolves my insomnia by inviting me to hang out with friends from 3 until 7 a.m. & then makes me smoothies & coffee & teaches me how to tie sailing knots & reads my poems on the fire escape. Thank god.