Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

�� Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God" ��






My chapbook, The Language of Exile, is available from Main Street Rag. I like to trade chapbooks. I want yours. I want it now ....

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2005-12-07, 12:15 p.m.:
I just wrote this incredibly detailed entry which I lost when I wandered blithely off to sort junk mail and fill the dishwasher, leaving the toddler (Scourge of Computers Everywhere) alone with my Powerbook. The upshot was: thinking of "Distant Music" (both story and title character, Ursula K. le Guin) lately as well as the German concept of Zukunftsmusik, for which I believe no adequate translation exists.

Next, talk of Novalis and how I sit in the garage memorizing poems now since I find myself reading them aloud anyway - to no one, to myself - or at least mouthing them to the air. Nostalgiazing over my old tram ride to Brehmplatz, during which I would memorize a poem a week or so (the ride was really under ten minutes), mourning having forgotten parts of "Elegy and Rant for My Father" (Shomer) and "Brooms" (Simic). And I don't even have a crib copy of "Elegy and Rant" any more.

What else? Novalis. Sometimes in the garage, in between poems, I read the short short chapters of The Blue Flower, lord knows why I'm rereading it, but I like it, I like that the book's structure - this fragmentation - models Novalis' own fragment modus operandi in his philosophizing. Discussion of how I had no idea who Novalis really was (despite having been a German major and "specializing" in the Age of Goethe) and would ponder his enigmatic unknownness while reading my favorite novel, Jude the Obscure. WP and I aruguing over what exactly the poet's epigraph to the book ("Charakter ist Schicksal") meant: He saw it one way (destiny forms your character), I saw it another (your character determines your destiny). The English translation, "Character is destiny," being lacking as the German original leaves to the reader's discernment whether character or destiny is the subject of the sentence. It could go either way.

I wrote something about the act of reading aloud without focusing mainly on meaning. Words, lines, cadence, movement, list, arc, thrust. Because I don't want to think while I'm sitting in the garage, smoking. Mainly. I want to sit and look into the four corners of the room. I want it to last a long time. I want my mind to be still, or become stilled. So I will lose myself in the one, slow poem. Sometimes, also, I will sit and stare at the box up high on a shelf, labelled "Xplosive chemicals." It sits right next to a big can emblazoned "industrial kerosene." This I find amusing.

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2005-12-05, 10:13 a.m.:
North Carolina actually has a poet of the week (heads up from Ken Rumble). Why? Why them and not us? Because NC is the Ireland of the U.S.: lousy with poets and writers. More than enough to go around. And Colorado? I don't know. I haven't been Out There, in the community. I know no other writers here, and who here in the wilderness who is a writer is not also a crank? We have those a-plenty. Cranks. Perhaps I myself am a crank. Because that's the thing about crankhood - it's a label from the outside, not a moi-m�me description.

I did try to attend a reading by Elizabeth Robinson and Jake Adam York recently. I geared up to leave the baby for the first time, pumped milk and put on actual Outside Clothes. And I drove into Boulder in high winds at about 7PM on a Friday night. Long story short, I never did find the place the reading was supposed to be, there was darkness everywhere and no place to park - Pearl St. mall on a Friday night - and cars honking and beeping right on my tail and I ended up driving in circles for 20 minutes, well into the reading's starting time. A little aluminum-foil-covered plate of pumpkin muffins sat on the passenger seat beside me (for the potluck portion of the evening). I had on my favorite coat, just recently dry-cleaned and not worn since early in pregnancy #1. I had printouts of new poems (for the open reading portion of the evening). I had just been rereading Elizabeth's Robinson's new work in the Denver Quarterly. I like it. I really want one of her books.

I never did find the reading. I was nervous about being away from the baby for so long (turned out to be not more than 2 hours), for the first time (that was the thing - I was actually in another town). I wanted to spend the allotted time left over browsing in a book store but I didn't want to buy books there. That was the thing. I would not by any means be able to leave without buying books. No money for books just then. That's the beauty of readings: they're free. Free books, or parts of books, with a meet-the-author thrown in.

It had been - it has been - so long since I was at a reading.

So, thus far, that's my experience in my own very own 'community of writers' here in the Front Range. And now that Penny Lane has closed down, ending an era that will certainly never come again to Boulder (and which I missed by not moving here in the 1990s), I don't even know where there are open mics anywhere short of Denver. I don't want to drive into Denver most nights. There's the conundrum: wanting contact, community, but here in the wilderness it seems like a tall order. It seems like I'm completely on my own. And I miss North Carolina and all my old peeps there like the fucking dickens.

In baby eye color news, I think we will have another brown-eyed boy here. Not definite, but naheliegend. He's taking his sweet time about it, though.

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2005-12-02, 4:49 p.m.:
what we call the baby:

crawler, groaner, shrieker, squeaker
screamer, squirmer, butterball, squirt
bald boy, happy, smiley, chuckler
buddy, old buddy, old sport

ro, ronan, baby boy
toe-sucker, lip-smacker, white boy slim
freak-out boy, my young padawan learner
freaker

I want to call him gimli or gimlet too.

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2005-12-02, 1:51 p.m.:
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
--W.B. Yeats

Gravesite visits: I've been to Yeats' (under Ben Bulben), and at Pere Lachaise: Sarah Bernhardt's (no white lilies to lay there) and Oscar Wilde's (somewhat crazed old man waiting there to tell visitors of how the stone angel lost his genitals to vandals) and Jim Morrison's (among the punks; no bottle of wine to pour into the liquor-hallowed ground). And at Arlington National Cemetery: Daddy's, Skipper's, Jonesy's, Don's.

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