"Does Mr. Bush consider Musharraf his friend or Pakistan his friend?”

Question by Nawaz Sharif, former prime minister of Pakistan, upon his visit to Benazir Bhutto's gravesite. The full article is here.

More on Sharif can be found here and an interesting blog discussing events in Pakistan is here.

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Benazir Bhutto moments before her death

This slide show is from the NY Times.

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Benazir Bhutto Assasinated

News reports from Pakistan and elsewhere confirm that 54-year-old Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in Pakistan.

The NY Times reports that the former Prime Minister of Pakistan was shot in the neck and head before an explosion moments later. At least 20 others were killed in the suicide attack. Bhutto had been speaking at a public rally in a park in Rawalpindi, a city near the country's capital.

This is the second attempt on her life since she returned from exile in October of this year. Bhutto was the leader of Pakistan's People's Party (PPP), the largest opposition party in Pakistan, a country which has been under military rule for eight years.

Bhutto, a graduate of Harvard,held the post of prime minister twice, first from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. She was the first woman to hold that position in Pakistan. After her father's death by hanging, Bhutto assumed leadership of the PPP.

Just before the rally in which she was killed, Bhutto had met with visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai. In a statement after their meeting, Bhutto said: “We too believe that it is essential for both of our countries, and indeed the larger Muslim world, to work to protect the interest of Islamic civilization by eliminating extremism and terrorism.”

Bhutto had left her self-exiled life in London to present herself as an alternative to the military rule of General Musharraf, whose government was responsible for her security. Before returning to Pakistan, Musharraf had dropped the graft charges that had caused Bhutto to flee the country years earlier, making it possible for her to return without threat of imprisonment. This was considered a first step toward a potential power-sharing pact between Musharraf and Bhutto to occur after the general elections this coming January 8.

The U.S. government considered Musharraf its strongest ally against al Kaida. However, just a month ago, the leader of Amnesty International urged the U.S. to investigate the repressive actions of Musharraf, specifically his house arrest of Bhutto as well as his imprisonment of thousands of PPP members including lawyers, and the removal of Supreme Court justices. Amnesty International urged the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan to visit Bhutto and asked that Pres. bush suspend economic and military support of Musharraf, stating:

While the Bush administration continues to view Pakistan as a valuable ally in the war on terror, it must not turn a blind eye to Musharraf's continued repression of the Pakistani people. Amnesty International urges President Bush to direct U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne W. Patterson to visit Bhutto, Chaudhry and Jahangir to evaluate their welfare and discuss recent developments. President Bush and the United States need to send a signal to Pakistan's civil society that Musharraf's blatant disregard for freedom of movement and peaceful assembly and the use of martial law will not be tolerated.

CNN reported that "the attack came just hours after four supporters of former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif died when members of another political party opened fire on them at a rally near the Islamabad airport Thursday, Pakistan police said."

In a statement from the hospital where Bhutto died, Sharif vowed to avenge her death.

Bhutto was sharply interrogated by MSNBC correspondent Ann Curry for the loss of life that followed in the wake of the first attack against her in an interview days after the attack. A video of this interview can be found at MSNBC.

Reuters news report on Bhutto's assassination is here. The Canadian Press report is here. Time article here. CNN report here. UK government reaction here. BBC report here.

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Swinging the Ching

Here's today's random draw from the I Ching: 59. Huan / Dispersion [Dissolution]

Commentary below (from deoxy.org with gender-specific pronouns intact):

Wind blowing over water disperses it, dissolving it into foam and mist. This suggests that when a man's vital energy is dammed up within him (indicated as a danger by the attribute of the lower trigram), gentleness serves to break
up and dissolve the blockage.

THE JUDGMENT

DISPERSION. Success.
The king approaches his temple.
It furthers one to cross the great water.
Perseverance furthers.

The text of this hexagram resembles that of Ts'ui, GATHERING TOGETHER (45). In the latter, the subject is the bringing together of elements that have been separated, as water collects in lakes upon the earth. Here the subject is
the dispersing and dissolving of divisive egotism. DISPERSION shows the way, so to speak, that leads to gathering together. This explains the similarity of the two texts.

Religious forces are needed to overcome the egotism that divides men. The common celebration of the great sacrificial feasts and sacred rites, which gave expression simultaneously to the interrelation and social articulation of the family and state, was the means of employed by the great ruler to unite men. The sacred music and the splendor of the ceremonies aroused a strong tide of emotion that was shared by all hearts in unison, and that awakened a consciousness of the common origin of all creatures. In this way disunity was overcome and rigidity dissolved. A further means to the same end is cooperation in great general undertakings that set a high goal for the will of the people; in the common concentration on this goal, all barriers dissolve, just as, when a boat is crossing a great stream, all hands must unite in a joint task.

But only a man who is himself free of all selfish ulterior considerations, and who perseveres in justice and steadfastness, is capable of so dissolving the hardness of egotism.

THE IMAGE

The wind drives over the water:
The image of DISPERSION.
Thus the kings of old sacrificed to the Lord
And built temples.

In the autumn and winter, water begins to freeze into ice. When the warm breezes of spring come, the rigidity is dissolved, and the elements that have been dispersed in ice floes are reunited. It is the same with the minds of the people. Through hardness and selfishness the heart grows rigid, and this rigidity leads to separation from all others. Egotism and cupidity isolate men. Therefore the hearts of men must be seized by a devout emotion. They must
be shaken by a religious awe in face of eternity-stirred with an intuition of the One Creator of all living beings, and united through the strong feeling of fellowship experienced in the ritual of divine worship.

THE LINES

Six at the beginning means:
He brings help with the strength of a horse.
Good fortune.

It is important that disunion should be overcome at the outset, before it has become complete - that the clouds should be dispersed before they have brought storm and rain. At such times when hidden divergences in temper make themselves felt and lead to mutual misunderstandings we must take quick and vigorous action to dissolve the misunderstandings and mutual distrust.

Nine in the second place means:
At the dissolution
He hurries to that which supports him.
Remorse disappears.

When an individual discovers within himself the beginnings of alienation from others, of misanthropy and ill humor, he must set about dissolving these obstructions. He must rouse himself inwardly, hasten to that which supports him. Such support is never found in hatred, but always in a moderate and just judgment of men, linked with good will. If he regains this unobstructed outlook on humanity, while at the same time all saturnine ill humor is dissolved, all occasion for remorse disappears.

Six in the third place means:
He dissolves his self. No remorse.

Under certain circumstances, a man's work may become so difficult that he can no longer think of himself. He must set aside all personal desires and disperse whatever the self gathers about it to serve as a barrier against others. Only on the basis of great renunciation can he obtain the strength for great achievements. By setting his goal in a great task outside himself, he can attain this standpoint.

Six in the fourth place means:
He dissolves his bond with his group.
Supreme good fortune.
Dispersion leads in turn to accumulation.
This is something that ordinary men do not think of.

When we are working at a task that affects the general welfare, we must leave all private friendships out of account. Only by rising above party interests can we achieve something decisive. He who has the courage thus to forego what is near wins what is afar. But in order to comprehend this standpoint, one must have a wide view of the interrelationships of life, such as only unusual men attain.

Nine in the fifth place means:
His loud cries are as dissolving as sweat.
Dissolution! A king abides without blame.

In times of general dispersion and separation, a great idea provides a focal point for the organization of recovery. Just as an illness reaches its crisis in a dissolving sweat, so a great stimulating idea is a true salvation in times of general deadlock. It gives the people a rallying point - a man in a ruling position who can dispel misunderstandings.

Nine at the top means:
He dissolves his blood.
Departing, keeping at a distance, going out,
Is without blame.

The idea of the dissolving of a man's blood means the dispersion of that which might lead to bloodshed and wounds, i.e., avoidance of danger. But here the thought is not that a man avoids difficulties for himself alone, but rather that he rescues his kin - helps them to get away before danger comes, or to keep at a distance from an existing danger, or to find a way out of a danger that is already upon them. In this way he does what is right.

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Counting

8:45am Eastern Time. Jacksonville, FL. Outside my window, the squirrel is holding a pecan in its gloved claws and chipping away at the husk. The shrimp plants raise their vivid heads. Their leaves won't take another 30-degree night. Already, they hang like limp flags, needle thin and stunned by last night's cold.

My house is clean except for a spot of wet catfood on the kitchen tile, ashes on my desk, toothpaste in the sink, rabbit pellets in the animal room.

Tomorrow I travel. Wake at 4:30am, take a ride to the airport an hour later, walk the gauntlet called Homeland Security, find seat 17A, land briefly in Charlotte, that nexus of boredom, and then fall into L.A.

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The Sylvan Echo: Take Two

Congrats to my fellow Scarlet Tanagers for the publication of issue two of The Sylvan Echo.

Editors Mel Jones, Barbara Simpson, Andreanana Binder, Kristen Stoner, Apinya Pokachaiyapat and Desiree Kannel have produced an online journal that is visually attractive and packed with quality writing.

Unlike some other literary efforts, The Sylvan Echo presents a wide field of writing, which includes poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and an editorial. Not stopping there, it also reproduces visual artwork and wood carvings.

Hats off to you guys! Antioch's MFA Creative Writing Program gets another feather in its cap. Click on over and check it out!

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Merit pay for teachers?

The prospect of merit pay in the teaching field is a can of worms. But it's an issue that continually pops up on the campaign trail, sparked no doubt by the generally lousy pay scale of teachers across the nation.

While on a campaign stop in Iowa, Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton discouraged the prospect of merit pay for teachers, saying the results would be "demeaning" and "discouraging" and asking the all-important question: who will determine the recipient? School-based merit plans are more to her liking.

When teachers address the issue, they often find more fault than benefit. The National Education Association (NEA) along with some state teachers' unions are opposed to the concept. Why? Well the first question was targeted by Clinton: who will be the judge? Will it be at the administrative level, where actual teaching progress is not based on individual student accomplishments but on the institution's retention goals? In other words, in a class of at risk students, a fair percentage simply will not complete a course. Some drop outs may be academically related issues. But economic conditions, family climate and discipline issues all take a huge toll on student success rates. How would it be fair to judge a teacher's performance when case management rather than pedagogical issues determine success?

Who or what else could determine performance? Test results? Students? Peers? Objective bodies?

In each case, the determination would have to create some kind of standard. Objectivity and relativity would be required. Comparison and contrasts, statistical baselines, variables, and time frames would all fall into the mix.

But the idea of inserting another layer of economic-based competition among educators is disturbing. Particularly when a more substantial solution could be made available: across the board increases in starting pay.

Here in Florida, Gov. Charlie Crist re-worked a formerly contested merit pay plan and signed it into law last June. The old plan was legally contested by the state teacher's union.

The plan covers the public school system and participation is optional. Each of the 67 school district decides at the administrative level whether to join the program. If elected, teachers must be awarded at least five percent of "average teacher pay," a move that pre-empts higher bonuses to veterans already earning a higher salary.

The bonus is determined by a mixture of test results (60%) and measurable levels of effectiveness among teachers (40%). Offhand, it sounds like an incentive mix of school-based and teacher-based criteria.

But the issue nationwide still lacks a resolution, and by many accounts is a shortcut for resolving the low level of overall compensation for teachers, an issue the NEA labelled a "national emergency" seven years ago when it rejected merit based pay incentives. More recently, the NEA flatly refuted the proposal:

The fundamental problem is low teacher pay, period. Merit pay schemes are a weak answer to the national teacher compensation crisis.

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The Nature of Regret

Earlier this week, I participated in the first International Poetry Reading and Reception at the community college where I work.

I originally planned the event eight months ago, and later linked it with the College's International Education Week festivities - a concession to my Dean, who proved to be my strongest backer, not only of the event itself but of my own dreams, desires and effort. As a result of this commingling of events, the day was out of my control, and fixed to a Monday evening.

First regret in hindsight: Monday is a lousy day to hold a poetry reading. Turnout was light. We moved the audience, who had seated themselves toward the back of the auditorium, toward the front.

Second regret: Large auditoriums may reveal high confidence in speakers and audience. But in reality, a small attendance is glaringly noticed when so many seats are empty.

This was my baptism. I've read at a number of places - and looking back, I realized the rooms were cozy, tight. Usually, seats had to be added to accommodate everyone. And without exception, these were held on a weekend evening.

Then there was the time frame: two hours of seating without interruption requires unusual stamina. Now why didn't I think of that? How many plays, concerts and other staged performances have I attended? Plenty. And how many of them force attention for 120 minutes? Well, hmm now. Few. When this particular convenience was not provided, people started leaving. Rolling into the second hour, individual abandonment became a contagion. When I watched my two good friends rise from their seats and lurk out, I knew my mistake was a biggie.

The morning after, I awoke with a sour memory. Disenchantment and disappointment poured over me like a deluge. I couldn't shake the awful feeling that I'd led two wonderful poets (Celia Alvarez and Marisella Veiga) into an open pit, a vast darkness; that I had not attended to reality - day, time, space, breaks.

But regret is like yeast that rises into a mountainous mass and two hours later, falls flat, levels out. It took more than two hours. But finally I recognized that my disappointment was based on untested expectations. A "first" of anything has inherently higher risk than a repeat act.

And continuing in the vein of relativity, I just read of a poet's experience at a reading arranged at a bookstore. She had zero turnout. She sold one book. And she received no honorarium.

So the nature of regret is flexible. Now I realize that an audience of 80-90 people ain't so bad when the alternative is zero. I recognize that press before the event, while not shaking the rooftops, was good. And, I recognize that poets do not go out of their way to support other poets. Multilingual people, immigrants, the displaced, English faculty, ESL faculty - they are the same. This isn't a condemnation, just a simple truth.

And the nature of regret is that it comes ready made for learning. I'm already meeting and organizing for next year's poetry event.

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Blog Scans

Up early this morning and skipping from (mostly poetry) blog to blog. Here's what I've found worth reading:

On the benefits of repetition: Diane Lockward talks about the value of writing out already published poems in longhand. "I process the poem in a way that I don't when I merely read." Julie Enzser and Ann Lederer add to the conversation.

Call for Midwest women poets: Becky Ellis with Cherry Pie Press announces the 2008 chapbook contest for women poets with a connection to the Midwest.

Minimalism or deserved rest: Suzanne Frishkorn has been busy. Her newest full-length book of poetry, Lit Windowpane, will be coming out next fall. You'll be able to get a copy at Main Street Rag Press. Suzanne, I'd love to write a review!

Giving Thanks: Ron Silliman devotes space reminiscing about lifelong friendships, the Grand Piano project, and is promoting a benefit reading in San Francisco for Will Alexander, a poet with no insurance to cover his chemotherapy.

Random Gift: I drifted over to Ruth Ellen Kocher's blog without any foreknowledge of her identity. I'm glad I did. She first recalls the power of a word ("will") and its synchronous effect on her life. Then there's a reflection of the visceral power of poetry, on how when she reads, her hand automatically moves to her heart, where she is touched, the intersection of body memory and verbal memory. And she talks about being homesick for poetry - a state I can empathize with - how it has moved out of her head, out of her house, and the distractions she machinates while the silence endures.

On the road: Go over to Gina Franco's blog for her random photos. She's been traveling and takes you along. There's a fish barely out of water, a grainy close-up of a tumbling shed roof, road signs, a mirror shot, eerie looking doll faces and snow falling in Roswell, NM.

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Blog Grades

I ran across one of those quickie blog ratings and put mine through the test. According to The Blog Readability Test, my blog is at the level of high school. hmph!

Well, I wondered, how do other blogs compare?

I started a few random checks. Here's how folks are being graded:

• Suzanne Frishkorn: GENIUS
• Margo Berdeshevsky: GENIUS
  
• Ron Silliman: GENIUS
• Anni Ballardini: GENIUS
  
• Barbara Jane Reyes: COLLEGE (Post Grad)
• Jilly Dybka: COLLEGE (Under Grad)
• Rachel Dacus: HIGH SCHOOL
  
• Lyle Daggett:HIGH SCHOOL
  
• Gene Justice: JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
• Julie Enzser: ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
  
• The Hypertexts: ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
• BitchPhd: ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
  

I wonder how this gadget determines "readability" - is it connected with average syllabic count or with comprehension?

What's your score - or do you care to know?

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NaPoWriMo Week Three

BLACK FRIDAY

ten Mourning Doves flurry across
the flagstones, dust-speckled wings,
something god-like in their descent.

A grey squirrel scratches the top crust
of a potted plant, pecan in mouth;
its body nimble as electricity.

Oyster white tiles and the waft of lint,
familiar Tide in the air, the clutter
and warmth of the laundry room.

A forgotten can of cranberry sauce,
a single lemon, the remains of French
Cut Green Bean Casserole.

Skin bright Clementines shine
an invitation from their rustic box;
orange silence at hearthside.

4AM clamor at Kohls -
imagined wealth, mock war,
elbows and adrenalin.

That second cup of coffee,
sweet as syrup while red-bulbed
shrimp plants burst like fiery pokers.

In a quiet alcove, a woman
is haunted by the deadly thing
stirring under her arms.

She surveys the ads, subtracts
the ordinary from the onslaught:
lymphoma, MD Anderson, memory.

She questions the day, the dip
in temperature, the possibility
that teases, stirring like a vine.

An oak tree splits asunder,
reeds attached to its hide.
Symbiosis fights suffocation.

An oceanic hush now as light
wind tilts the browning leaves.
One Blue Jay sings through silence.

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Build Vocabulary & Feed the World

Click image, feed your mind & feed others, grain by grain.

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NaPoWriMo Week Two

Nov. 5, 2007

Natural Surrounding

The shrimp plant outside my window is a forest
to the ants circling below, driven
by innate regimen to survive.
A noose circumscribes the neck
of a neighboring oak,
sticky vines in their relentless march:
symbiosis or suffocation.

This warm animal glances
from behind a viscuous wall,
believes she can rake in the scent
of Fall as it singes the blood
of gentle tallow, breaks the neck
of the fern and empties
the husk of the wasp, reverting
to its former life as bamboo chime.

She claims some bond - green in the veins
or bayonet hands, perhaps a lack of warmth,
the inclination to thrive on borrowed seed,
sipping from a flower pot, black
with fungus, no matter, it's wet.
She tightens her grip on the elements,
weaves a dry nest of shallow breath,
thinks she can endure.

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The Genographic Project

Has anyone participated in the Genographic Project sponsored by National Geographic?
If so, what kind of surprising results?

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Our Home

This National Geographic video traces the path of hominids, beginning around 195,000 years ago in the Omo River Valley in Ethiopia. It's a fascinating journey, moving from Africa to Australia, where clicking became the predominant mode of communication. Language began to develop with the emergence of the hyoid bone, which actually forms speech.

Language became the force governing not only the evolution but the survival of the early human. Around 50,-70,000 years back, tool use and language skills combined to create art and society. Those hominids whose genetic code did not contain the capacity for these expressions likely died off (more than a suggestion for the essential value of creativity). This "evolutionary dead end" of the hominids (Neanderthals),has been linked to their inferior thinking ability, dooming their branch of genetic development and opening the path to today's human.

A land mass called Sahul was home to the earliest known human settlements, survivors of the Ice Age, who used tools to clear land. The continent Sahul eventually became the separate countries of Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania. Human remains near Lake Mungo, New South Wales, are the earliest found outside Africa. Meanwhile, the hunters in Africa migrated north, tracking mammoth and populating much of Eurasia. To the south, a group of humans were populating caves and perfecting the art of drawing, leaving behind some 400 images of 14 different species of animals, ranging from the rhinoceros to bison.

The migration from Siberia to North America came about 25,000 years back when those mammoth hunters crossed a "land bridge" into Alaska called Beringia. Archaeological finds at cactus Hill, VA, date to 18,000, showing that these hardy predators made their way across the mostly iced-over continent during an extended period lasting around 10,000 years. Over in Europe, the Magdelanian culture was creating advanced tools and investing "substantial time and skill in cultural activities."

Once again, the predominance of creative expression marks an advanced level of culture.

Once the Ice Age receded (5,-10,000 years ago), agriculture began to replace hunting as the primary foundation of culture. Sedentary civilization, trade and artistic endeavors each broadened the degree and strengthened the permanency of these old humans. Goddess worship or matriarchal cultures connected to natural rhythms, was the preeminent structure of many societies.

Flash forward - What will our tracks leave behind to the next eons? Footprints that muddy and desecrate, global capitalism that blithely causes animal extinction? What creative expression will be unearthed? Flash drives loaded with nonsense? Videos of "shock and awe" in which antiquities are destroyed and looted? And what of evolution? Will ethnic cleansing replace the natural patterns of evolutionary survival?

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NaPoWriMo Starts

Starting the month with a haiku:

Nov.2, 2007

Restless needle -
thought winding in and out,
a bee without honey.


Uniform Days

When we went Downtown, officious
trips to the busied structures
fronting Laura and Bay streets,
Mom held me by the wrist at each
street crossing, her face pained
and straight, her posture perfect.
Bills with deadlines brought us there
but once, we entered the glittered
realm of May Cohens, entering a side
door, hand in hand, her grip
inescapable, while amazed eyes
captured the width of column,
marbled ballustrade, ornate
elevators with bronzed frontispiece.
She held my wrist as we approached
an opening, a gulf in the floor,
stone steps and shiny railings
led down to the Basement,
where the Sales were hidden.
It was late August, outside,
the sun was steep and mosquitos
visited nightly, a blitzkrieg among
sweet grass and fireflies.
The basement held racks of white
blouses, short-sleeved and plain,
pocket-ready for the parochial
school badge. There were navy blue
beenies and navy blue jumpers,
a clean panoply of uniforms.
This was the beginning of my
uniform days, Mom's exact gaze
searching and finding necessary
items, my hand in hers, silent,
while all around, the world
opened in color and curiosity
unveiled itself, like a sticky web.


Sleep Walk

The needle of nightmare pricks
and guides like a wand of dense symphony
luring eyes open, relief from the staccato
of stuck tongue, dark glue of immobility.
For two nights now, it's brought
me to the quick release, feet fumbling
for the carpeted floor, the soft
groove of solid ground, the golden grass
of artificial turf to settle me.
Then the Buddhists sing their "Oms"
amid a background of synthetic
waterfall and moog music,
my morning coffee with U-Tube.
In three hours these eyes, ears
mouth, back will adhere to another
pastiche - the hum of bleak work song,
computer screen and red blinks,
false logic and prayers surrounding me.
This is no nightmare but a premonition.
Grasping at the edge of a hole,
swinging my hips upward, making good grasp
of tumbling weeds and dirt, while
below me, the emptiness of free fall.
In the distance, a lullabye,
its faint echo like Circe, calls
me back to sleep another day.

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Being Southern

Thanks to Julie R. Enszer who posted these two poems by Jane Cooper. Cooper was born in Jacksonville, FL, my hometown.

Being Southern

1

It's like being German.

Either you remember that yours was the defeated country
(The South breeds the finest soldiers, my uncle said,
himself a general in one of his incarnations)
or you acknowledge the guilt, not even your own guilt, but

Can any white person write this, whose ancestors once kept slaves?

2

Of course there were "good" Germans.


My father was still under 30, a passionate Wilsonian, when he was named a delegate to the 1916 Democratic Convention. By the end of the first evening he had discovered that eleven of the other Florida delegates were members of the Klan, he couldn't answer for the twelfth, he was number 13.

Only a few years later he argued for, and won, token black representation on the Jacksonville school board.

And my aunt as a girl went into the sweatshops to interview Cuban cigar workers, all women. She found the first Girl Scout troop in the South for, as she put it, colored children. True, it was segregated. But it was the first.

Take your guilt to school. Read your guilt in your diplomas or the lines of the marriage ceremony. Face your guilt head-on in the eyes of lover, neighbor, child. Ask to be buried in your guilt.

Of course they were paternalistic. I honor their accomplishments. What more have I ever done?

When is memory transforming? when, a form of real estate?

3

Transplanted "north" in 1934 I never questioned
a town that received its distinguished refugees
with a mix of pride and condescension: the specialist in Christian iconography
in her man-tailored suits, Einstein like a disembodied spirit
pacing our leafy sidewalks. Only because my best friend lived next door
would I glimpse him, sometimes at twilight, tuning his violin
as his back yard filled up with tents

But why can't I remember the actual men and women who slept in those tents, among patches of ragged tigerlilies? the children with skinny arms, who would soon be passed along. . . ?

All he could vouch for. Not famous. At their backs
the six million.


Hotel de Dream


Justice-keepers! justice-keepers!
for Muriel Rukeyser and James Wright

Suppose we could telephone the dead.
Muriel, I'd say, can you hear me?
Jim, can you talk again?

And I'd begin to tell them the stories they loved to hear:
how my father, as a young boy, watched Cora Crane
parade through the streets of Jacksonville with her girls
in an open barouche with silver fittings;
how the bay haunches gleamed as they twitched off flies,
polished hooves fetched down smartly into the dust,
ostrich feathers tickled the palates of passers-by.

Muriel, I'd say, shall we swing along Hudson Street
underneath the highway and walk out together on the docks?

.the river would be glittering, my grandmother
would be bargaining
with a black man on a dock in Jacksonville;
grapefruit and oranges would be piled up like cannonballs
at the fort in Old St. Augustine. . . .

I'll never put you in a nursing home, you said early that year,
I promise, Jane, I'll never put you in a nursing home.

Later Cora Crane showed her dogs right next to my aunt's.
They had a good conversation about bloodlines
amidst the clean smells of kennel shavings and well-brushed dog
but never, of course, met socially
although she had dined with Henry James.

Jim, I'd say, remember that old poem "The Faithful"
you helped me by caring for? How what we owe to the dead
is to go on living? More than ever
I want to go on living.

But now you have become part of it, friends of my choosing years,
friends who magnificent voices
will reverberate always, if only through machines,
tell me how to redress the past,
how to relish yet redress
my sensuous, precious, upper-class,
unjust white child's past.

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ED #104

These strangers in a foreign world
protection asked of me;
befriend them, lest yourself in heaven
be found a refugee.

Caveat: Emily's "heaven" was not a site of immortal reward, as her traditional reviewers assert. It was daily pursuit.

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Grief Among Students

I've been working on an anthology of student writing - and emerged from the obsession of page formatting yesterday to recognize a strata of grief in their voices.

These are mostly young (20s) writers, burgeoning learners of the English language, refugees and asylees from Latin America, South America, the Near and Far and Mid East.

Their trials of English parallel the trials of their past, and their present. Death and memory are strong currents. Then, juxtaposed with the prevailing sadness, one or two voices that recall joy and rely on hope.

I'm pulled by two inclinations when I wonder about their writing. The total environment that attaches itself to the immigrant is my first thought. Is this an expression of an innate sadness, a longing and rue that accompanies people who leave their country, home, family, culture for the U.S.? Then I look at them as beginning writers, as neophytes who tap into those powerful emotions that surface so quickly and which seem so easily expressed. By why sorrow? Why not passion or its kindred, love?

Their writing has a restrained tone to it, unlike the usual messy purple quality of beginning writers. I burrow just a little deeper, and thoughts of content and tone are replaced by the practical realization that English is alien. Were I to compose a poem in Farsi or Haitian French Creole, would I plunge heart first or head first?

I'd tred slowly - aware of imminent mistakes in construction, fearful of the faux pas, wary of connotation and inexactitude. Finding metaphor would be a leap in cognition. Careful restraint might appear as disciplined emotion when in fact, it's just careful restraint.

But apart from construction, I keep returning to that sadness. Longing and loneliness.

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NaPoWriMo?

well it sounds hokey even to me but when November rolls around, I recall the unfinished mss ("The Cottage") that I started a few years back during the NaNoWriMo and then as my focus narrowed, the NaPoWriMo that I dared the following year.

November will be exceedingly busy for me (international education poetry reading & launch of a student journal) but I've got to get in some poetry writing - even if it's unrestrained lines spewed at the end of a day. NaPoWriMo - the concept of writing one poem a day for the month - gives me a challenge that can be fulfilled without the censor of perfection tightening my throat.

Daily poems will be posted here - with small regard to their content, messiness, drivel, C-status - and with the goal of just eking them out, my one-a-day vitamin during this month. They'll fall under the columns of prelude and practice and to hell with publish-ability.

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Jane M. Cooper, Poet, 1924-2007

Obituary

Jane M. Cooper, Poet, 1924-2007


Jane Marvel Cooper, poet, Professor and Poet-in-Residence Emerita at
Sarah Lawrence College, died peacefully at Pennswood Village, Newtown,
PA, on October 26th from complications due to Parkinson's Disease.
Family were with her at the end.

She was the daughter of the late John C. Cooper Jr. and Martha Marvel
Cooper, and sister of the late Rachel C. Baker, all formerly of Armour
Road, Princeton. Jane Cooper was born in Atlantic City, N.J. in 1924.
She spent her early childhood in Jacksonville, Florida and then moved
with her family to Princeton in the mid-1930s. There she went to Miss
Fine's School where, in her senior year, she won the Leslie Shear Poetry
Prize for two works: "We are the Generation of War" and "I have Sung
Solitary Various Worlds", early signs of future acclaim.




She attended Vassar College 1942 to 1944 and earned a B.A. from the
University of Wisconsin in 1946. She joined the faculty of Sarah
Lawrence College in 1950, where she remained as a teacher and poet in
residence until her retirement in 1987. Over that period, together with
Grace Paley, Jean Valentine, Muriel Rukeyser and others, she helped
develop and enhance a writing program that became one of the most
distinguished in the country.

In 1953-54 she took a year off to get a M.A. at the University of Iowa,
where she studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. She received
much recognition in her lifetime including awards from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for
the Arts, the Bunting Institute and the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.

Jane Cooper maintained her links with Princeton over the years, but she
lived most of her adult life in New York City. She also spent several
summers at Yaddo and the McDowell Colony, working on her own poetry. Her
first book, The Weather of Six Mornings, appeared in 1969 and was
followed at intervals by four others: Maps and Windows (1974),
Scaffolding: Selected Poems (1984), Green Notebook, Winter Road (1994)
and The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed (2000). She was named
State Poet of New York for 1995-97.

She is survived by her brother, John C. Cooper III, of Tucson, AZ, five
nephews, two nieces and three grandnieces. There will be a service at
All Saints Church, Princeton on Saturday, November 3, at 1:00 p.m. All
are welcome. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Immune
Deficiency Foundation, 40 W. Chesapeake Avenue, Suite 308, Towson, MD 21204.



(Prepared by the family of Jane M. Cooper, October 2007)

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STOP and relax.

"Om Mani Padme Hum"
The Meditative Sounds of Buddhists Chants CD.

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remembering Emily

as I begin my critical paper...

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games in the middle of the night

well it's 1:20am EST - time for most people to be sleeping in my time zone, especially if we share Monday morning work rituals. But I'm awake with lots of time to kill before I begin to feel sleepy. A nap in late afternoon is the culprit. But the nap came because my bones were tired, and my eyes, and shoulders, even my hair. Problem is the nap went into overtime without my permission. Now here I sit in front of the computer, surely not a good thing but regardless.

So I found a little pastime roaming around blogs. I'm copying straight from the source (Mary Biddinger's blog) with my own alterations. The following 106 books are the Least Read among the Library Thing folks.

The Rules:

Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your "To Be Read" list.

[I rarely reread prose though poetry often deserves many readings. Wonder why there's no poetry on this list?]


Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World*
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

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Riot police evict nuns

65 Polish nuns, defrocked by the Vatican, were evicted from their convent by police in riot gear.

According to a spokesperson for the Catholic Church, the nuns were "disobedient" when they refused a Vatican order to replace their mother superior.

“They were disobedient,” said Mieczyslaw Puzewicz, a spokesman for the Lublin diocese of the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican formally expelled the women from their Sisters of Bethany order last year, but has revealed almost nothing about the dispute.

Their electricity was cut-off a year ago, according to MSNBC.com and the nuns survived on food smuggled to them by nearby residents.

One version of the story is here.

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Find Previous Posts Here

If you'd like to read any of my previous Red Hibiscus blog posts, you can find them all here: http://redhibiscus05.blogspot.com/

The former blog stretches back for about four years.

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New Address, Same Blog

I suppose it was bound to happen: my gmail account was compromised and as a result, I have permanently lost access to my email and to my blog. Rather, I can look at the old Red Hibiscus blog but cannot add new posts. And I can receive email through my old gmail address but cannot send.

And incidentally, this occurred after I requested tech support from gmail for some odd happenings with my email.

Now begins the time-consuming task of developing a new blog, shifting over all those links, one by one, deciding what to keep, what to drop.... I'm opting for a simplified blog right at the moment.

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Great American Poetry Anthology

Speaking of anthologies, Larry Ziman sent an invite to my email the other day, promoting the Great American Poetry Anthology.

What's this?

Who is Larry Ziman?

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Anthology redux

Thanks to Denise at the New Pages blog for bringing up the question of anthology merit. Although I couldn't find the responses, she did post a follow-up which included a comment that covered at least one of the major issues with the glut of narrowly-focused subject matter anthologies:

From Dinty W. Moore, editor of Brevity :“I honestly don't know the answer, but thanks for asking all of the right questions. If an anthology ‘packager’ doesn't at least have a plan to find distribution, it seems unlikely anyone will read the book other than the authors and the authors' friends. Which begs the question: if a book falls into the forest of books, and no one hears it fall ...”

Of even more significance to me is the screening process (anyone who submits is printed versus a merit based filtering), which is inescapably linked to more issues - will the anthology weather time? are the contributions representative of the highest creative voices or simply representative? is the anthology intended for its contributors or a wider base of readers (the distribution question fits here)? is the anthology simply a revenue generating effort for the editor/publisher (something Denise brings up) or more cynically, a route to false kudos in the land of special interest publishing?

I'm leaning toward a weaning of the anthology glut. Accomplishing this in the era of electric messages is the first challenge.

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Praying

Praying
from Mary Oliver, Spiritus 6 (2006).

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but a doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

###

haiku tries:

Mexican poppies
lean against a bamboo fence,
pink mouths swallow rain.

While the feral cat
eats from my dish, I can gaze
at its wildness.

Snow in the summer -
Cottonycushion Scale
floating on sun rays.

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Landscapes

Every love has its landscape. This place... haunts you in its absence.
Rebecca Solnit: A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

I came across this in my moleskin, a snatch of thought from a year ago. How evenly it matches my recent reading: Healy's Islands Project, Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return. And on my computer, the scattered notes of Curtis Fowler's Waking the Poet. "Nothing is as real as place," says Healy and whether that place is time (both limited and expanded) or whether that place is a city street in another country, the backyard of our childhood or the shape of our room as we fall asleep, it penetrates us.

Place catches us in its mesh. We see through its net; respond and react to the idleness or the activity that it engenders, the individuals who walk through it, whose memory substantiates it. And yet, the obverse is also so: we create our landscapes. It all results in a strange symbiosis.

Is it any wonder then, that when we step away from the known boundary of neighborhood and town and state and country, that we are best able to objectify? That when we are released from the comforting bonds, the known pockets and valleys of the familiar, we can see with a fresh eye and decide without the scrutiny of our own habits? Place is as much an entanglement as it is a unifying fabric. When we walk outside the knit of the known, we can begin weaving something new.

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Healy, The Islands Project

Healy, Eloise Klein. The Islands Project. First. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2007.

What are these islands in the vastness of open ocean and what is their origin? Think: fragments surfacing as separate entities; volcanic eruptions, fractured parts of a whole. Imagine islands as independent chips off the block of the earth table, coalescing into forms with self-sustaining ecostructure and infrastructure; islands as individuals apart from the concentrated countries with their clumps of citizens, cultures, languages, taboos. Healy’s islands evolve separate but equal to their collective counterparts, similar in shape, texture, needs but obstinately, essentially apart, different. And yet, there is origin, the mother, the durable inevitable connection.

The islands of Healy’s newest book of poems are echoes and convolutions of the original islander, Sappho: these are women thriving in self-sufficiency. They are islanders of time and continent, akin in their independence. These islanders include the poet herself, who recognizes a door and whose own “complicated embodiment” contains glimpses, scraps and fragments of adjoining lives. Whose own life of sight, memories, auric echoes, anger, metaphor and physicality embodies and recalls other “isolates aswirl with life.”

And what is this “project,” a term signifying a concerted effort, a mission, goals, specificity? It’s an effort to get at the geography of these landscapes, the origins of these islanders, to rediscover the door, recognize the entranceway.

A random rescued piece
becomes a better bit
when joined, when each bit
meets its neighbor and the isolate
is shown to be a rich piece
of an unfolding archipelago

Healy’s mission is to take “the lonely isolate / or broken note,” those scraps of papyrus that remain of Sappho, combine her song with the songs of other islanders, and show “the fragment is not a scrap, not a bitter lover, alone and disconsolate” but part of a greater made whole by the joining.

The mission is to recoup the “lost notes” of Sappho and join them with her twins, to turn echoes from statue to flesh, retune the lyre, let it echo anew into ”the clang of things.” Different music for a different twin who hankers for “hard things,” whose own music led her with a “chrome handle to a different and difficult world.”

To reclaim that echo, Healy arrives “to see for herself,” the silent, empty island that was Sappho’s, a physical quest, the catalyst and a first door toward this recognition. “Nothing is as real as place,” and the beach at Skala Eressou is that “hardscape” origin.

“I am living in a lineage of desire / defined by others before me.” The desire defined in the pages of The Islands Project are living fragments of the poet’s mother, whose thoughts roamed like scattered winds. “She is my other / blasted heritage, beautiful in disarray.” That island of fragmented beauty is twinned with a procession of other women: “The Singing School,” enumerated by their uniqueness and their commonality: “all of them,” the poet says, “have passed down Sappho’s street.”

The map of that lineage extends from the beach at Skala Erresou to Echo Park, where two isolates touch within the hardscape of a car, the heat of their fission fogging its windows, the fog replicating the shape of the unknown, not yet visible form emerging. Here the map turns from the four-year marriage, the solid coding and broad lines of the heterosexual country, takes a plunge into the waters of women-loving, swims out into that vast sea as another islander.

As Healy makes her way toward Sappho, she offers homage to recent and long-gone islanders. Here are the ex-pats of Paris: Barney and Stein, Barnes, Brooks, Colette and De Pougy and Rosa Bonheur with her livescapes of horses, portraits of dogs. And here is the Flower Shop where the blight of AIDS fed on the sap and sweetness of its proprietors. Here is Artemis, not Aphrodite (what heresy to bloom fullgrown out of the brain of a god) and old Walt. And in the back and forth marathon swim toward Sappho, there are those others who protest, who frustrate, who proclaim otherwise, who doubt, who get in the way, who deny.

Isolates have their origins, and Healy searches backward a generation, moves forward a lifetime. She uncovers origins. She affirms the future:

Whatever emerges, a poem
written by a lesbian poet
has a heritage of flame,
and no matter what Sappho was,
any woman who “comes out”
springs from a burned life
as a poem.

With The Islands Project, Healy achieves something more than poetry, something more than narrative. Though the story is cohesive, satisfying and encompassing. And many poems stir with gracefulness and strength, honesty and robustness; their tonal quality and diction rising out of the ordinary.

These lyrics are more aligned to ritual, and yet there is a vital freedom coursing through them that denies the stricture of form. The Island Project sings of release. It has the feel of a compilation long-stirring, biding its time and finally emerging.

BUY THE BOOK HERE

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Mary Oliver: master as pupil

Oliver, Mary. Why I Wake Early. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.

I have yet to tire of Mary Oliver. In book after book, her words flow by like leaves in a spring, simple, uncluttered, a flash of elegance. Why I Wake Early slowed my enchantment.

Oliver covers the same ground: snapshots of the land outside the writer’s doorstep (and within). The diction keeps its clarity. No excessive modifiers. But there’s a bothersome element in a few of these poems - a fancifulness that I’d not before noticed, as in “The Arrowhead,” where the spirit of its possessor intrudes with too clever, too pat, too predictable dialogue.

“I would rather drink the wind,” he said
I would rather eat mud and die
than steal as you steal,
than lie as you still lie.”

The chastisement is unremarkable, more fitting for middle school reading consciousness. Or Oliver leans too heavily on the easy abstraction, stealing conclusion from her readers. For example, “Beans,” a severely hyphenated prose poem, concludes with this question: But, what about virtue? as if filling in the blank for the dull witted reader.

But Oliver redeems herself with the perfectly clean, evocative glimpse of “The Snow Cricket,” where her lines row across the page in spontaneous rhythm, with the reader as passenger, eyes open to her scene. There is the cricket, its “little mouth-cave,“ and the swell of loneliness as it sits “pale and humped” all evening in its “leafy hut in the honeysuckle.” Oliver entrances again. She pours out the stream of her vision uncluttered by concepts. She visits Blackwater Pond, the font of her visions, to introduce gentleman snake with his “lazy wake” and “narrow mouth,” using just enough verbiage, a modest modifier or two, just enough to open and point the lens of the readers’ sight. We follow her in the path of a beetle as it makes our narrow, busy, glum lives more destitute with its “sighing,” its “humming,” its existence nestled against the soft undersides of a fragrant flower. This is irresistible Oliver.

Is she a pantheist or a Romantic with her glorification of the simplest living being? More than anything, she is a storyteller. Her lyrical apologues show us the live lore. And if at times, her pen is a hammer or her words are bulbs of explanation or if she invokes a machinating “He” of biblical standard, then this is just the writer seeping in, a blunt aside. I can live with it - the master as occasional pupil is far more reassuring than alienating.

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Blue Pastures: Oliver's finest, again

Oliver, Mary. Blue Pastures. First. San Diego: A Harvest Original, Harcourt, Inc., 1995.

Just as I’d thought that I’d imbibed the sweetness and the crust of Mary Oliver, traced her thoughts on the craft of writing, believed I had an inkling of what moved her, along comes Blue Pastures, a gift dropped into my hands.

Here is another Oliver: the truant school kid in Ohio, hauling Walt Whitman in her backpack, the high school grad who was privy to the “secrets” of Edna St. Vincent Millay. In Blue Pastures, there is also the familiar naturalist, trekking for miles in search of an owl’s nest, and the poet of the ponds and coves, of Provincetown beaches, cataloguing the detritus of Herring Cove, the “bright trash of the past,” and giving us her “Sand Dabs,” entry moments that may or may not lead to a finished poem.

This collection of vignettes is about recollection and revelation. In “Staying Alive,” the poet I’d thought so private says:

Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.

I quickly found for myself two such blessings - the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.

But this is not a story about victim or anger or the sludge of grievance. Far from it. This is Oliver’s remedy: “… having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.” So much for the critics who want to contain her in the realm of “nature poet” or “romantic poet.” So much for the harpies who call her asocial, who clamor for human messiness in her lines. Oliver found her cure in the wellspring of adjacent worlds: writing and nature.

Blue Pastures teems like a school of brilliant fish; it has the luster of an eggplant, supple and smooth and dark. Her language mimics the lyricism of her verse: elegant and simple. She observes and absorbs and shines back to us what she sees. She is the Magician that channels, using the wand of the pen. This collection is testament to her urge to not just write but to witness, and not just witness but to become participant in what’s out there. As Oliver says: “It is the instant I try to catch, … not the comment, not the thought.”

Evaluating this book, in the scheme of other Mary Oliver books I have read, I want to call it the finest. But this unreserved enthusiasm comes each time I get a taste of Mary Oliver. It’s immediate and it endures. So that this response illustrates what Oliver calls the service of poems: “I look for them to be ongoing presences within my life, not interludes-not places apart.”

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Beauty and Brutality: Facts About the Moon

Dorianne Laux. Facts About the Moon. First Edition. NY, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

The title poem appears midway in Laux's newest collection, a deliberate placement to emphasize not so much the tone but the archetypal drive of this work.

The poem begins in a plain-spoken literal way: "The moon is backing away from us / an inch and a half a year," then drifts toward a personification in which the speaker tells the reader:

I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who's lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who's murdered and raped

Laux personalizes the equation of a grieving mother into the image of such a being, "romanticizing" her culprit of a son. A mother who has "forgotten the bruises and booze," is coupled with a cold-eyed observer who wants to "slap her back to sanity" until the observer recognizes the futility. There's no logic in the room for "you know love when you see it, / you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull."

Facts About the Moon follows a similar structure: poems of literal image and personification ("The Trees"); poems of anchored abstracts and allegory ("Democracy," "The Ravens of Denali"). Again and again, she portrays the "brutal pull" of love, whether in her lyric to a fallen hummingbird or the narrative journey leading to a brother's grave.

The "lunar strength" emerges in poems such as "Moon in the Window" or in the aching couplets, the catalog of "What's Broken." She celebrates it in odes to a lover ("Face Poem," "Kissing Again," "Vacation Sex") and in her delicate lyrics to nature ("Cello," "Mornming Song," "Starling," "Come Spring" and "The Life of Trees").

Laux makes the mundane valuable, incorporates those things that determine everyday order and rhythm: jigsaw puzzles and laundry. She juxtaposes the tedium of housework with what matters: "the bleachy,/ waxy, soapy perfume of spring."

Facts About the Moon contains the variety and brutality of what is under the sun, in motion across the earth, characterized by a babysitter suckling her eight year-old charge, a pool hall starlet and sisters bonding: "Pretending we were beautiful,/ pretending we were dead." The pedophile father, Fred the German neighbor, symbol and antithesis of the Holocaust, the shadow of Mathew Shepard, strung up and left for dead - all these citizens of earth are gathered together in this volume, anchored by the moon and undone by the moon. In the background, the soothing, patient perfection of this planet's wildness. These are the facts, brutal and common, of the moon.

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Brand: Notes to Belonging

Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

Too much has been made of origins. All origins are arbitrary.

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I try to tell him, you don't write about racism, you write about life.

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Why is all geography irony?

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In a new city there are ghosts of old cities. There are lies and re-creations. Everyone thinks that a city is full of hope, but it isn't. Sometimes it is the end of imagination.

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I stepped into the cool opening of the Door of No Return. My feet landed where my thoughts were. This is the trick of the door - to step through and be where you want to be. Our ancestors were bewildered because they had a sense of origins - some country, some village, some family where they belonged and from which they were rent. We, on the other hand, have no such immediate sense of belonging, only of drift.

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