From the rooftops of Iran to the world, 3 July 2009.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Gov. Sarah Palin on the Wooten scandal and VP
Video of Palin being interviewed for accusations of abuse of power.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
In Memorium
I celebrate all the creatures that have come under my care, filled me with their joyful spirit and then passed on. In the last two years, the list has increased to an unfortunate number.
Haiku is the most recent loss. He was my birthday gift seven years ago, purchased at Jim's Pet Depot and hand-selected because of his ebullient, sociable nature.
A week before Haiku died, I found the seven perfectly-evolved bodies of the three-week young dwarf hamsters. Sport, their momma, was in the nest with four of her litter, either denying their death or hoping to revive them. Three others were found at various spots in their cage. The eighth, a runt, had died and was cannibalized by his siblings a week before.
Goodbye Haiku!
My darling yellow-faced parakeet Haiku, died on May 30, a week after first taking him to the vet.
The Ching on Mentoring
30 The Clinging, Fire
Guiding, Directing (an Ideology)
From guidance comes direction
"LI : glowing light, spreading in all directions; light-giving, discriminating, articulating; divide and arrange in order; the power of consciousness. The ideogram: bird and weird, the magical fire-bird with brilliant plumage."
From guidance comes direction
This is what one looks for in a mentoring relationship - "guidance" - the sage advice from a veteran, a fillip of insider info, a dash of mystery so that the mentee can proceed with her own decision, just enough withheld to make the mentee's own knowledge, experience, gut the motivating cause.
- [n] the trait of trusting; of believing in the honesty and reliability of others.
- [n] complete confidence in a person or plan etc.
- [v] allow without fear
The mentor doesn't engage in trust so much as in presenting herself as trustworthy.
Yet, how is that proven? Especially how is that demonstrated to a mentee whose nature turns on the opposite edges of faith and doubt? There has to be a composition, a tangible piece of craftwork that turns visions into substance. It could be as simple as a plan, an outline of objectives, something that demonstrates continuity and progression. This is not about assuaging the fear of the mentee - well yes it is - but by using practical tools. The visible beats out the assumed. Monsters are put to sleep not with prayers but by the conclusive fable, with the finality of the nursery rhyme. Prayers are another form of trust. They do not prove reliability.
At what point does this mentoring relationship conclude?
It can last for years, building and evolving into transformations. It can last up to the moment of an achieved objective. It can disintegrate when reciprocity disappears. It goes away when the mentor loses faith or the mentee loses trust.
A mentoring relationship with vitality is a protracted blend of the amorphous and the perceivable.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The Anomaly of Accomplishment
So here I am heading into the final semester of the MFA program, accomplishment in sight, and wondering: what of it?
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Missing
This is the day that forbids reproduction. Mother's Day, May 11, 1991, I arrived at my mother's home with a card and Crimson Glory, a vibrant bush of red roses. She had the hand, the one that touches those temperamental flowers - violets and roses - and brings them to bloom.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Motherhood Times Six
This morning my dwarf hamster, about the size of an engorged tulip, gave birth to a litter of pups! A fascinating voyeurship for me, gazing thru the glass of her aquarium home to see three pinkies with their bulbous, lidded eyes, their nub tails and their veiled viscera.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Friday, March 7, 2008
Letters to the World
Letters to the World, the long-awaited poetry anthology published by Red Hen Press is now available.
The anthology is a collection of poems and short essays from members of the WomPo (The Discussion of Women's Poetry) listserv, founded by Annie Finch. Members of the listserv, and anthology contributors, include over 500 hundred poets living in the U.S., Paris, Australia, Great Britain and other parts of the world. The membership is a mix of well known names (Alicia Ostriker, Marilyn French, Eloise Klein Healy) as well as those without such lustre such as myself. Anthology contributors have organized readings throughout the U.S. and elsewhere to promote the book.
Letters to the World was edited by a cadre from the WomPo listserv: Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace and Lesley Wheeler. Its origin and organization occurred online in a most congenial and efficient process, thanks to its editors.
Buy your copy today. Buy another for a friend. Recommend it to your college library, English department, local bookstore, area poetry groups, literary associations.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
New finds on the net
If you have a knockout piece about any topic you think relates to women's lives and experiences, by all means, send it!"
LINE BREAK - a single poem by a single author for one week; audio version included.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
MARY KONCEL: You Can Tell the Horse Anything
Surprising Juxtapositions and Surrealism Abound
Koncel, Mary. You Can Tell the Horse Anything. 1st paperback ed. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2004.
Appreciating Mary Koncel’s You Can Tell the Horse Anything needs a reader who is appreciative of the surreal.
A first reading of the collection of 66 prose poems gives the reader a vague clue as to underlying motifs but leaves her adrift in attempts at “making sense.” There seems to be a non-relational air to the poems. They exist as separate entities, fed by Koncel’s liberated imagination, effectively barring the reader from a lucid understanding and emotional response. Titles act as explanation; give the reader a sense of direction. But when the content is reexamined, the elements of surrealism emerge.
He didn’t understand. His
head began to ache. He
understood Buicks, red hair,
the smell of day-old beer.
In “After the Weather,” Koncel introduces a primary motif: the possibility for release, the potential for the limitless and the ecstatic, those flights with “migrating angels.” And when the path to transcendence is rejected, she shows the result: a fall into victimhood, death, “severed wings.”
In “The Big Deep Voice of God” Koncel depicts that separation from reality through another register. Here a man responds to “a voice” and packs his family in the family car. He orders them to remove their clothing and they obey. They are spurred to this act in response to an ultimate authority, “the big deep voice of God.” There is no individual determination. It is collective hysteria.
Tommy is the driver, the channel for the voice and the one in control. He and his passengers travel blindly, mindlessly, unconsciously. There is movement but no transport. They agree to remove their clothing, to bare their souls, a vulnerability of the highest order and reminiscent of those metaphorical characters in that metaphorical garden. In doing so, they transcend common moral and social codes. Stripped to the skin, these people are arching toward the angels, toward immortality. Yet their performance is a passive one, plunging toward some unknown destination, traveling faster for some unknown reason, blithely obedient. The poem’s action might as well be depicting the response to a schizophrenic auditory hallucination.
There is one exception: Tommy’s wife. She escapes the hysteria and is released into a passionate, pagan creature.
She hadn’t
heard the voice but thought if she did it would call her
“Sugar.” “Sugar,” it would say, “your thighs are hives of
honey, and I am the Bumble Bee of Love.” Quivering, she
pressed her left cheek against warm blue vinyl.
Allowed the freedom of nudity, she responds with hedonistic pleasure. Her reverie is transported by an ancient matriarchal symbol: the Bumble Bee of Love. She quivers in answer, presses her cheek against blue vinyl, the only warmth in the vehicle. This is Eve incarnate, possessed of her nature, the one who questions. “At home, she often wondered too.” The doubting is a solo performance that has already moved against the finiteness of earth, the chores of the housewife. Leaning across her kitchen sink, the wife finds transport across the “still white clouds of steam,” an ether akin to the expanse of air. She listens. “Opening her mouth, she always took in more than air and water.”With this inhalation, she imbues more than the primary elements. She is actively pursuing something other than her limited position. Koncel bestows potential on this woman. She opens herself to the “possibilities of chance.” She follows the quiet path of reflection in contrast to Tommy’s senseless drive toward salvation.
“Lake and Michigan” brings forward another image of nakedness. Here we have statues of “metallic and bare boned” horses in a city park being defiled by a youngster. The intimate first person voice decides that the exposure of these inanimate objects is a vulnerability that needs protection. “The horses need some hair.” The danger of public exposure is too risky. It is not inclement weather that will cause destruction but the perverted prank of a kid shoving an ice cream cone in the horse’s rear while his mother sits in passive audience.
This simple scene with its desecration, its errant child and detached mother, messily eating ice cream, typifies the surrealist’s complaint against society. Hirsch explains: “The surrealists were scandalized by the repressiveness of society and thus scandalized society in return.”
Koncel’s hit on society is mild, somewhat elusive yet present nonetheless. This vignette peers at the origin of scandal – the non-instructive parent and the clueless child who begins his journey toward scandal with evil acts committed against nonhumans. That the recipients of his incipient cruelty are horses is not random. Koncel returns to pre-Christian symbology with the horse, sacred to Celtic goddesses, signifying energy, power and freedom. The little boy’s defilement is an attack against those symbols. And he shows an emerging distaste for the corporeal body, its ends and outs and common functions. His mother’s inactivity is a passive acceptance of the boy’s assault. She is complicit in the shaping of a torturer, one who has no recognition of the sacred in everyday life. In her complicity, she is also denying the traditionally female alignment with wildness. She is contemporary woman - ignorant, inactive and divorced from an awareness of and respect for nature. She is the obverse of Tommy’s wife, acting as a direct juxtaposition.
The speaker is trapped in senseless society in “Blackflies,” a weird container of juxtaposed images introduced by the eternal question, “a flutter of Why’s.”The speaker encounters traffic, a man dressed in a chicken costume complete “with a sign that says Why?” A runaway hot dog cart snaps a flagpole in two, Americana destroying America. Blackflies chase the speaker, the dark gadflies of absurdity. Salvation comes when the speaker blows her horn for no reason other than “a moment of calm.”
This is a picture of the slow passage of surreal images, enmeshed in an elongated moment. Time goes forward and backward. Reverie is nonsensical, fraught with inner dread. The traveler is swept along in an amalgam of everyday craziness. It intrudes upon her sensibilities, her reason. Release must be claimed. It must be loud and harsh enough to break the spell and grant silence.
I Could Tell the Horse Anything continually reaches into the morass of the quotidian, showing doors of release, showing the gates of restriction, showing the danger of flight. It is populated by spark plugs and hub caps, balanced against rural scenes and farm implements, alive with domesticated, wild and immobile animals, housewives, evil babies, earth goddesses. Koncel takes them all, shakes them up and empties them into a container of prose verse that works as narratives of the absurd, a channeling akin to the automatic writing of the first Surrealists. The reader gets tossed in this crazy salad, the bowl of everyday living to make sense of the senseless, to see beyond the elements of confinement, to look within for meaning. Ultimately, this is where Koncel will succeed in her modern surrealism. If she can convince her readers that there is no interiority in outward scenery, that retrospection, independent of the circumscribed lives of society, is where one can discover what lies within. This inward look can sprout wings – not those of angels or demigods – but the kind of free flight that breathes life into living.
NOTES: On Dickinson's Cosmology
“Blank” – the unnamable, the unnamed, the secret, the absence, the fill-in-the-blank invitation and acknowledgement, the empty and the deliberately obscured; a refusal to name, literally and figuratively, personally and tangentially.
“Blank” as substitute; enigma for meaning.
“Blank” as the unformed, emerging conclusion.
“Blank” as censure.
“Blank” as the stopping point and the gateway; the mysterious, elusive, unfulfilled knowledge; truth unknown, hidden or waiting for interpretation.
“Blank” as the empty page, as total absence, as representation of all absence, the black hole, Plato’s cave. Lack of certitude about Truth, Love, Faith, moral and religious absolutes.
In contrast, Dickinson is sure of the predictable, recurring stages of nature, the exterior, nonhuman world. This is her firmament. This is her faith substitute. This is certainty, regularity, an unstoppable force, unsympathetic. It is the known. It requires no struggle for meaning. It is independent of emotion. It contains its own scientifically provable logic and intelligence.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Sen. Hillary Clinton at Human Rights Campaign Board Meeting
Another reason Hillary Clinton gets my vote.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Obama 2006 Nation Interview
In comparing Obama to Clinton, much has been made of his principled exhortations as opposed to Clinton's "calculating" strategy to gain the Presidency. This interview, conducted in 2006 before Obama announced his candidacy, takes a look at his deliberate strategizing to remain tight with the Congressional status quo.
Obama is telling the truth--he's not opposed to structural changes at all. However, he appears to be interested in fighting only for those changes that fit within the existing boundaries of what's considered mainstream in Washington, instead of using his platform to redefine those boundaries. This posture comes even as polls consistently show that Washington's definition of mainstream is divorced from the rest of the country's (for example, politicians' refusal to debate the war even as polls show that Americans want the troops home).Obama's strategy worked. He got Ted Kennedy's backing, proving that he's much more the mainstream candidate than the progressive, and though his liberal politics mimic Clinton's, the difference is that his lack the courage required to climb out on that outstretched limb and breathe the rarified air of independence. He's more comfortable huddling in the nest, where boundaries are defined by others.
To me, this is an ominous tendency, especially for someone casting himself as a voice for "change." More than that, it is disingenuous, and we don't need a smoother, smarter one of those in the White House!
Click to the full interview.
On Why to Vote for Clinton: Robin Morgan & Goodbye to All That
To view Robin Morgan's essay at The Women's Media Center, click here.
To read Robin Morgan's 1970 essay "Goodbye to All That," click here.
To read Robin Morgan's 1970 essay "Goodbye to All That," click here.
Goodbye To All That (#2)
by Robin Morgan
Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure” to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one.
February 2, 2008
“Goodbye To All That” was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics of accommodation especially affecting women (for an online version, see http://blog.fair-use.org/category/chicago/).
During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .” But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities—joint conscience-keepers of this country—been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.
Goodbye to the double standard . . .
—Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
—She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains?)
—When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.
—Young political Kennedys—Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.—all endorsed Hillary. Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)
Thursday, January 24, 2008
NY Times Endorses Clinton
The editors of the NY Times have come out in strong support of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for President.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Iraq Wants More
The NY Times reports that Iraq is asking for more time (U.S there for up to another 13 years) and more equipment (the laundry list included helicopters, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and people).
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Postmodernist
That's what the results claim. here's the poop:
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| You scored as Postmodernist Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis.
|
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
