Sizing Up the Sparrows

Buster's hands were like leaves, veins spreading out and out

2008-10-05T20:23:00.000-07:00

Autumn comes, rolls in like the fog, like someone once said – on little cat's feet. Autumn is this way as well. Quiet until it is upon us, until the wind knocks us over suddenly in a gust as a wave is wont to do. Pulls us under with its scents of decay and longing. We like the bite and the chill, but we forget these things until the gust comes to knock us down. And at once we remember. We relish the taste of fires being slowly lit. We look forward to putting our bundled shoulders against the wind – acknowledging the comfort of a bear's hibernation – we endure with mixed feeling of pleasure and distress the sting of the change ,for we stand amidst the colors we forgot we knew. Colors that swirl in invisible eddies around our feet. How could I have forgotten such love for a leaf? Perhaps I never knew it before, not like I know it in the present moment....

Autumn is the dance before the nightly retire, the one last hurrah before we give up the last beats of our hearts. To snuggle down for the long darkness that we cry out against with so much fear and so much sadness. So many people write about Autumn. You'd think it would have lost its mystery; we'd know it by heart and not give a thought to it for a second. Autumn would be just a word with a definition, with a simple signifier and we'd move on to winter where the challenges mount and we wait in uncertainty for the coming spring. But perhaps this is why so many write about Autumn: it is inexplicable, needing thousands of metaphors and similes, thousands of poems and prose to grab a wisp of it as it rushes by, carrying along with it the colors, the cicadas in the trees, the smells of cut wheat and drying summer grasses, the living testaments. It is elusive. It is full to the brim of an excitement inexhausted. And we forget what it is and what it holds, so when it comes on its cat's feet while we are still holding onto the the last strands of summer, surprise fills us up. What a glorious thing is Autumn! And part of this fullness is sadness because we know how short it is, that the colors fleet past our eyes and nose and become once again part of the dirt – dead – and giving life years and years from now.

But I am not years and years from now. I am now. And I want to feel everything this moment. I want wind to whirl and the reds, yellows, and oranges to float about me and fill my nostrils while I hold a cup of tea and look upon and hug everyone I know from all my time on this little blue planet. In all my selfishness, I want you with me always – the same as I want Autumn with me always.

Autumn. It's a little girl's name. It's my favorite girl's name. I see her standing among the leaves; they are swirling about her in that invisible eddy, not minding if they land on her knitted hat or the shoulder of her jacket, crumbles of them stuck in her socks and scratching her ankles. There is nothing but joy and a few missing teeth. Nothing but hope, for how can you not hope when you see life going out with such a brilliant, shimmering bang. Maybe for you Autumn is an elderly woman smiling – as she touches the cold pane of glass – at the child in the yard who jumps recklessly into the beautiful mound of decaying leaves. But Autumn is a child, Autumn is me long ago with hopes beyond hope, recklessly bounding into the unknown depths of a pile of leaves. I want Autumn to stay with me always and remind me of that child that I often forget. I desire most fervently to simply remain with that unceasing hope, but the most I can achieve is to be like Autumn and go out with a brilliant, shimmering bang.

For you, my love. For me.

Wordsplosion!

2008-09-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

So I've found the greatest website. And yes, it's called wordsplosion. And yes, it makes me happy to laugh at other people's grammatical and spelling errors. We all do it. It's just funnier when someone else does it and you get to point and laugh.

Her stories are runon sentences that never end and never connect enough to make sense.

2008-09-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

What has your grandmother told you? Things to remember, I suspect. Sprinkles, or puddles perhaps, of wisdom tossed over her shoulder or whispered in you ear while she sat you on her knee.

My grandmother has given up these things as well. All my life - "You can, you can, you can..." Yesterday she forced me to promise her that I would write a book. She said, "Don't give up on the dream!" Did I ever proclaim such a dream? Perhaps it was my mother's for me? I had the dream to be a doctor, a vet, a runner, an artist, a musician, etc.... And isn't every page I write here, or anywhere else, part of the bigger book? And here we begin to question the meaning of words, the essences or the duality behind them...what is a book?

Anyway, as well as causing me to promise to write a book, she said that she is going to Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and Israel next year. And that they might not let her do what she wants to do in Egypt. I thought she meant, she would be restrained as a tourist because of the riots and because she is a women. But no. She wants to ride a camel.

She wants to ride a camel and have her picture taken on it. So that I can show my children and tell them: "Gramma may not have been bright, but she sure was entertaining." And that's the damned truth. My gramma is unabashedly entertaining.

Once, I was sleeping over at her house, and all the beds were full, so I slept with her. She snores, loudly. And I was having a dream, vividly. And for some reason, perhaps to stop the outrageous snoring, I sat up and punched her in the shoulder. She let out a great Yelp! And scared us both. I couldn't tell her how sorry I was. But she's gramma and she let it go. Though I'm giggling as I remember it now. How many girls punch their gramma's at night? Or at all? And it wasn't a nice nudge to roll her over - it was an all-out, no-holds punch.

That's one tough, entertaining Gramma.

Don't ever grow too old for me.

2008-07-23T20:35:00.000-07:00

Attilio Jacquemet, center, of Italy, rests after running the men's 80-84 age division 100-meter race at the 2007 World Masters Championships in Riccione, Italy. September, 2007.

Photograph by Angela Jimenez
Go to her website for the rest of her photography from the World Masters Championships.

Rocks from the basement of time

2008-07-23T19:19:00.000-07:00

For the past month I have been doing research for a short class I'm teaching in August. In the opening of my Norton Anthology to Short Fiction, there is a "Talking about Fiction" section that describes why knowing how pick apart certain aspects of a story is useful and it gives examples. Under the sub-heading of "Indirection" is an example of its meaning, just like the examples they give for all the other sub-sections, but this one has the most beautiful, complete little story that you should look up if you have the desire. It's called "Important Things" by Barbara L. Greenberg. The definition of the technique Indirection is complicated, but the editor explained it so beautifully that I felt the need to post it here:

"Most stories - much larger than this one in bulk - stir up questions of right and wrong, of what is worth living for and dying for. Truly these are "important things," and authors work with all their skill to guide us to a point where the inexpressible can be sensed. It is the best tactic of fiction to move circuitously to the point of revelation. Then those readers who have followed the path of indirections complete the reading transaction by going somewhat farther than they have been led, by drawing from themselves the impassioned judgment that will make the story whole" Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Sixth Edition, p. xxx.

I agree, Norton. Indirection, then, must be my favorite part of a good story - the feeling or the sense that there is something more behind the words, something that is tugging at you from the roots of emotion, from the cellars of the collective human experience. And this something is inexpressible! Words are inadequate. Even the word to describe the technique that produces this sense - Indirection - is inadequate.

But how, then, if no words can describe, do I convince my Japanese students that when Norman Maclean says at the end of A River Runs Through It, "I am haunted by waters" that he means to fill you with the same deep regret and ache that is felt not from "waters" but from the loss of something that was fleeting and beautiful? Will they sense the indirection? Will they understand that although the ending's tone is filled with regret, the beauty of the words, the carefully enshrined description of Paul's last fish, have endowed Paul, the brother who is incapable of being understood, with an immortality as a man who thought like a fish, who became a river, who left his brother with a sense of what is beautiful, with a sense of what is worth living for?

I don't know if they will sense it. Or even if they care to. But I have to teach it. With books piled everywhere around my room, this one by Norman Maclean lays open on my window sill to the last pages of the story, its words facing the evening sky, feeling the after-storm coolness of the air from the open window. The cracking wooden sill scratches its spine. Its pages don't bother a flutter. And its words have left me with that sense of something more beneath the words.

Something inexpressible.

Another lol

2008-06-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

I have a tiny fish with flowering fins named Nuke

2008-06-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

When...it's one of my favorite words. You wonder why its not something more exotic, like leviathan or euphonic. But feel it in your mouth and imagine there is a yearning person behind it. Imagine all types of yearning people behind it, yearning for different things.

Imagine my father - his bushing eyebrows in arc like my own, they rise and wrinkle his forehead. Just imagine his mouth moving to the word Cuando! in a faked Mexican accent, stereotyped and comical. It was the only word in Spanish he knew for a long time, and he didn't know what it meant or why it needed to be said; he only knew that it added something definite and emphasized. He liked the word in his mouth and the sound it produced. And when he said it, his yellow tooth showed. The fake one that replaced the one he knocked out long ago when he was twelve, when the front tire came off of his bike and when he landed face-first on the pavement. He could take this tooth and the retainer it was attached to out. He washed it with his hands and showed us the dark, imperfect hole it left in his smile.

I like to hear my father say this word. For him it is a statement. A command. Now is when. And when is always. And this is the way I hold the ones I love. The way I try to love the ones I hold.

"Night-time is for the boy who can fly."
and who can fly
not me not them
he's in the dream
where I touched your shoulder
felt the dew of your skin
the freshness of your flight

Smoosh, Oh I do love myself an onomonopeia

2008-05-24T12:41:00.001-07:00

Joe and I have been following this band since these sisters were 9 and 11 years old. Joe saw them open for Presidents of the United States in Seattle a few years ago. I wish I could prove that these girls love their talents and that music is for them a blanket and a tree house, not something they are forced to do by domineering parents. But since I'm distrustful of the news media (sometimes it's so easy to lie), watching them play is the closest I can get to honesty. And I feel, at least, that they love playing music. And this is why this concert video is so important and why you must watch it.

There are about 7 songs and you can skip through them if you like. The last two are my favorite. Be sure to pay careful attention to the drummer. She's amazing.

A woman asked if we carried anything that would get the devil out of her husband

2008-03-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't written you in a while. I won't give you excuses. But I would like to give you a run down, a short 5k of my life currently. Ha! And now that I'm at my computer I feel I have nothing to give you, nothing worthy of writing - just the quotidian, like taxes (and the death that will eventually follow).

Anyway, interesting fact #1: Joe and I are now veggies. For lots of reasons. Some you probably know. Some I doubt you do. Maybe I'll write about it one of these long days.

Most of you already know, I'm going to grad school in the fall. I didn't get the TA position. I'd be the worst teacher. My students would speak in foreign languages; they'd know proper nouns when I'd be stuck on adjectives; they would wallow in callow exasperation at my odd pauses. And they wouldn't laugh when I'd say, "I just lost my train." I dream, in wonder and fear, about the classes I will take.

About once a day I scour the classifieds for a better job and a house to rent. About a month ago while Joe was hiking in the valley alone, he met a man who was taking his dog "mouse hunting" along the river. He told Joe that he was weird for hiking alone, without a dog. Of course this is the same man who told Joe that he kept a dead mouse in his freezer because his dog liked to play with it sometimes, like a prize he'd won through rigorous battle. So, we need a dog like algae needs CO2. I think we can find a nice house with a fenced yard, and a few people want to move in with us. Do they know how clean I like my kitchen? Do they know I kill plants by simply being in the room with them?

My friend Megan entered a design contest and asked me to be her model. We've had three challenges now and we've won one. In fact, we're kicking ass, in my opinion, although when I say "we," I mean that Megan is oozing with creative fabric genius and she clothes me in magnificent things and I walk around sucking it all in while people stare at me. The audience takes pictures and videos, so I now know that I walk like a mobster when I'm trying to act cute and feminine. In the first challenge I nearly fell down in front of 100 people - seriously. Oh, its ridiculous and wonderful, like playing dress up every week. I should post pictures of Megan's winsome work. And videos. ;)

I am reading Bukowski and loving him because I'm reading of a life I will never lead. And it's mysterious, dark, haunting, and full of a broken passion. He writes of the saddest bars; of roaches and rats; of easy women, cheap wine, and gambling it all away; and then, on the next page, he'll write one solitary poem of passion and poetry and resurrection. His poems range from (seemingly) simple, narrative stories to the abstract poems that you have to read at least three times even to see the words for what they might mean, but it's all bewitching:

"...when the last fig falls and we are pruned from light,/our golden ladies gleaned of love - / infest us with the mercy/of stone." - from "the death of a roach"

Well, that's the best I can leave you with. I am trying to write but find it difficult. A coworker said last week that he noticed that there are many good writers, but the ones that get published are the ones who not only write well but also have something definite to say. My job inspires hopelessness within me and not much else; it's like a postmodern text; it's White Noise.

Thank God for Bukowski and the like,

Jess

I love lolcats

2008-03-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the World of Service Jobs

2008-02-07T18:15:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we are small

2008-01-29T18:21:00.000-08:00

Today I had the day off because David's girlfriend, whose name I won't attempt to spell in English, is coming to visit the U.S. for the first time, and he needed Saturday off. So we switched our shifts at that all-encompassing world of hokey-pokey and most usually all-accepting land of awe, the Good Food Store. The Taiwanese girlfriend has seen most of Europe and the East, but to see the US for the first time during an era where most of the world scorns us - where some of us even scorn us - is a strange thing to ponder. My selfish mind merely hopes that she will find something small and wonderful to hold dear about this country, besides what she has already found, which is David. I told him that at least she would be visiting one of the most mind-bogglingly beautiful places in the United States...the Rocky Mountains. He says that he's lived here so long that he takes it for granted.

He said that Joe and I should meet them for coffee this weekend, that we'd like her. I feel small and as though I would be that typical American that other countries rebuke upon hearing my American accent. I feel the burden of my country's flagging reputation, and I haven't even left my apartment.

On my day off, I spent the morning catching up on my favorite bloggers. You all write with such bravado and elegance. I feel as though we are listening to the same music. Please keep writing.

Last week I followed Megan around after work. She needed someone to hold her hand while she got her face pierced. Everyone laughs when I say that "She got her face pierced." But I can't say it anymore precisely in the time people give me to say what I want to say. You know how slowly I speak - people are too eager and impatient to hear through my slowness. Anyway, she got poked on her cheek, the blood flowed enough that I looked away, and Megan left a hand print in my newly crushed right hand. It's cute, though, her face sparkle. The man who punctured her in the face owns the tattoo and piercing establishment and usually does tattoos, so I asked him about birds, about scissor-tailed flycatchers. He whipped out a book of his work - lots of birds. He asked "Is it green?" No. "Good," he said. His name is Lee and he wants to tattoo a bird on my body. This is my bird:

What do you think? There are more pictures on Google images.

Here are my issues:
1. Where do I put it? Where I can see it and enjoy its beauty or where I can hide it if I want to do so?
2. In flight or not?
3. In color? It has such beautiful colors.
4. I'm terrified of putting something permanent on my body. If you've ever noticed, I enjoy being unadorned. There is something cleansing but beautifully mortal about taking off all your clothes, all jewelry, letting your hair fall down against your bare back and acknowledging that moment of the temporary return - the return to the moment before Eve felt shame at her nakedness, at her purely untethered self. It's a return to something that must be lurking deep inside us, something that is true and unconscious. If it wasn't there, I doubt I'd feel the way I do just before stepping into the shower. Maybe this is why I hate bikinis as much as I do; if you want to be practically naked, take off the uncomfortable spandex and feel a little bit freer. I doubt I'll ever cut my hair off because I utterly love the feeling of my swinging hair against my lower back.

But I can't take a tattoo off whenever I feel the need to be primordial or untethered to this social world. Would a scissor-tail be a part of me or a weighty piece of jewelry?

Well, if you have any thoughts, let me know. I wish I had a picture of Megan and her pierced face, so you could see how cute she is.

A good book or two to leave you with:

Instead of posting here I've been reading quite a bit, and three of the last four books I've read I highly recommend.
1. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - Long, beautifully written, though the last third of the book chances in tone a bit. Easy to follow while maintaining its stylistic beauty, so most people should like it.
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Many of you may have already read this or tried to read it, and I'll admit that I had some difficulty keeping up with it, but if you can pull yourself through seemingly meaninglessness of the plot, which happens to fill 99% of the book, the last paragraph will fill your soul, and you will say to yourself, "Yes, this book was everything it needed to be." But you can't understand the last paragraph without reading the book, so don't cheat. And if you think this book sucks, well.... (I'll just shrug my shoulders and probably understand.)
3. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - Her first book Housekeeping is in my top five books of all time. Gilead didn't come close to that but I'm certainly glad I read it. It's an easier read with less action and more reflecting on Robinson's distinctive perceptions of loneliness, Christianity, and faith. I will always enjoy Robinson's style.

That's all. Much love,

Sing to Me

2007-08-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

Recently several of my friends have fallen in love and rather quickly been broken by it. Utterly torn apart by feelings they don't understand nor will ever be able to reason through. One repeats to herself how stupid she is, while the other has committed to being the first Methodist nun.

Joe and I both have nightmares of the other leaving or falling out of love or cheating. In my dreams I scream and scream at Joe and at everyone, and no one gives a hoot for all my hollering. It's terrifying. I told my friend about these dreams. She thought that they couldn't be the sign of a good relationship, that there wasn't enough trust or something. I told her it had nothing to do with trust, that these terrifying dreams had no hold in actual events, no sensibility to them. When you put all of yourself into one fallible being - your hope and your future - you rely on that one person's love for everything, which means everything is at stake. How much love and joy does it take to balance the inevitable sorrow that follows the act of giving yourself up? The extent of my love and my neediness terrify me. And my dreams are full of sorrow. And life is beautiful for it.

In the words of C.S. Lewis:
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation."
So Lewis is a little over the top, but can see what he's saying.

In response to my friends' sorrow, I wrote them a poem. It is a rough draft, a love poem from the perspective of a future boyfriend. From my own perspective because I love them both.

Before She Sang to Me

Again, through the fluttering leaves of a tree,
the light plays her toes
like fingers fluttering upon a piano,
like a spell becoming,
like the being of my dreams materializing
in the late afternoon.

I am distracted from my game of solitaire
by thin skin covering blue veins,
by a broken blue toenail
that is caused by the weight of being human,
by the curving calluses I am anxious to touch
lest they explode in an opus released,
a concerto that is roaming wildly in my fingertips.

I could watch the light play her 'til dusk,
then, perhaps,
she'd allow me a turn,
a touch,
a beautiful sound for her to make.

For within one foot, she holds the wisdom
of an ancient upright, salted lightly with dust,
and the majesty of a Steinway grand
on a white marble stage,
the light from the stained glass windows
reflecting a myriad of colors across the concert hall,
and I, as I pause a few paces away,
wish with ache, like all non-musicians,
that I could play the piano.

How we cause wildfires

2007-08-14T06:39:00.001-07:00

On the other side
Of that mountain
You will find nothing
But everything the earth was
Before you.

2007-04-10T18:55:00.000-07:00

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

I highly recommend you to read this book, especially if you enjoy poetry. It is simply a masterpiece.

"He would pick up eggshells, a bird's wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp's nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jack-knife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses. At such times he was as forgetful of her as he was of his suspenders and of his Methodism, but all the same it was then that she loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own" (17).

Much love and busy-ness.

The Bazzzzz

Life, the cereal.

2007-03-05T10:18:00.000-08:00

Cereal for breakfast is always eaten out of a bowl. All other cereal is best from a cup. Soup mugs count as bowls. And no one in his right mind would eat cereal from a travel mug. Cups are best. They are portable. They remind me of childhood.

Moments She Might Have Told You Of

2007-01-01T12:18:00.000-08:00

She ate saltines over the new keyboard while you were gone. She could see the crumbs between and underneath the keys, getting crunched with every letter she typed.

She felt you hiding under the stairs, checking the mail. You asked her to explain her words, but she could only point to certain phrases and settled her eyes and ears on the bend of wind on the other side of the window. The birds landed on her sloping shoulders.

She used to play hymns in disguise on her piano, but not really in disguise because you didn't know any hymns and each one she played was new. Hallelujah came to mean something new. God became the moon and the moon reigned the night, smiling through the green, textured curtains upon your blessed bed.

She watered tomato plants because she loved what they gave her. She watered the strawberries for the same reason. With the summer heat seeping from the concrete through her shorts, through her skin, and heating her bones, she decided never to have children. Her children would not be heartbroken by their futures. Her children's children would not have to worry about water or read about gardens as something of the past or fear their own country and its people. She was selfish and compassionate in the same moment. She would take this moment of tomatoes and strawberries and warmth with her to eternity, and she would never let her children suffer a life with its absence. Her hands touch the driveway and grass simultaneously.

She'd rather have danced than talked with you.

She knows that this will be our year.

Happy New Year!

She Sat Among the Violets

2006-12-10T08:26:00.000-08:00

So words are dead, a prison where ghosts should be painless, but we persist in painting imperfect pictures for the sake of our own souls because we cannot find a closer connection to heaven.

Is Tuesday of voilets or violence? In beautiful irony, like a bird misjudging the air and crashing to earth by the force of a gravity that lets us hold on, the difference matters but is slight. Tuesday cannot hold violets without the violence.

Do you understand?

In sex, making love, we lose something personal, an unnamable part that we hadn't looked for before, and the hurt is mixed like paint with the joy of discovering a secret gift, a personal power. The fright, the loss, the discovery are inherently braided together, and words attempt to make sense of the knotted mess of yarn we have left lying on the wooden floor of the hall.

How close do we allow words to come? Behind one word are a thousand others. "Sad" means everything and nothing, and the inevitable question still stands: How do I find the words to say...

I wrote a poem, "You Were Little Sister, Diverging." It isn't a secret: I can't understand how our blood and cells and genes can be the closest possible between two people, yet she is incomprehensible to me. Let her be different. But there is so much she refuses to see.

Are there any words in any language to say what I need to say? Poetry theory claims that we find our closest meaning through analogy. Because humans share a common knowledge, we can understand the meaning behind, "All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players" (Shakespeare As You Like It). Ironic, no? To say something, we say something else because our words are not adequate in their meaning.

So I wrote a poem to imprison the best of my thoughts. Do I print it? Do I give it tangibility for her to see? No, she wouldn't see it. I'm afraid words have arrived too late, too inadequate to save a relationship that has been diverging for 17 years.

I want to tell her ghosts are not painless, there are no violets without the violence but also that it doesn't have to be as bad as she makes it. How bright does she intend to make the blood on snow? When will she find her closest connection to heaven?

She is little sister, diverging. Can I hope she is not already diverged?

My question for you: How close do we let our poems come to personal Tuesdays, and is there enough common knowledge, common emotion, left in this world for us to understand one another?

Basalil

Counting Syllables on My Fingers

2006-09-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

Last night I tried my hand at meter, the first try in a long while.

I started with a poem of slight substance, an epic idea, but my lines erred with disconnect. Some lines were short, biting with abstract poignancy and others lingered and fell off the page, while the reader and writer alike asked themselves why they were still sifting through the words in their laps when they could be playing softball or swatting flies.
It needed consistency.
So, after throwing the game, I sat down with my eight-year-old hands and counted the syllables in each line on my fingers. I wrote each number next to the line, like a good little soldier with a terrible memory.
Banking on the theories of very dead and very canonized, famous poets and on the quick suggestion of A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, I believed in the consistency of meter.
I kept the meter of the opening two line stanza and modeled the rest of the poem after it. During the course of two hours, I managed to write a better poem. I changed all except the first two lines, some drastically, some ever-so-slightly with the most beautiful of precise words, and really believed I knew what I was doing.
Unfortunately, I never know what I am doing. The first two lines of the poem, the ones I kept, actually do not coincide with true meter. Meter has two syllables for every "foot" of a line. Each line can have any number of feet.

A one foot line is called a monometer.
A two foot line is called a dimeter.
A three foot line is called a trimeter.
A four foot line is called a tetrameter.
A five foot line is called a pentameter; most people have heard of iambic pentameter.
A six foot line is called a hexameter.
A seven foot line is called a heptameter.
An eight foot line is called a octometer.

My lines are footless.
Because every foot has two syllables, each line will have an even number of syllables. My lines have seven and five syllables and therefore, have 3.5 and 2.5 feet, which to my knowledge is called nothing.
Yes, I have footless lines, am not even the equivalent of a slug who has one official foot, according to scientists.

So I failed at meter. I suppose it is a good thing that I have not tried ordering stresses of words in lines or complete forms of poetry like the sonnet, English and Italian, or even more complicated forms like the villanelle. God forbid that I attempt to rhyme anything!

Still, there are some positive attributes to the poem (says the poet). I am quite happy with the enjambment of the poem. Lines 3, 6, and 11 create momentary syntax of ambiguity. The word at the end of one of these lines could have one primary meaning when read with its line, but because the line has to punctuation at its end (it is enjambed), the word at the end of the line could have a secondary meaning when read with the line below it. And I like this, even if they are juvenile primary and secondary meanings.

So all this talk and no poem to dissect. Below is the third draft of this poem and probably not the last. Note that line 12 is not truly five syllables, but I have taken the liberty of smushing the word "memory," which is sometimes pronounced "memry" in the Midwest, and in effect, forced the line to be five syllables. Note also that Blogspot is not letting me design the poem with the correct amount of white space, so the master poem is structurally different.

A Rebirth of Blooms
by Jessica Zephyrs

She embroidered the Blue Ice
the Gray, then the Blush.

Clear curves -- flowers, familiar
shapes of butterflies --

Sensitive, flighty figures
and slow, the smallest

of stitches, an old woman,
a rebirth of blooms.

She embroidered the Pure White,
a ponderous hue

Thread so fine and light it strained
her eyes, her memory.

With the Oyster, the Deep Blue
she sewed simple birds

And pictures on the pillow
fluttered together.

Through the spring of a sparrow
her hands revived thoughts

of fitted dresses -- the strut
that won all the boys.

Well, say what you will. I tried. Maybe, someday, Meter and I will have another go at it, but until then,

A La Destra,

Basalil

Indecision

2006-08-18T16:03:00.000-07:00

I am currently rereading The Unraveling Strangeness by Bruce Weigl and wondering why he believes we are so alike and wondering if he has a wife, if he lost his author's bio while flapping his hands wildly at Mr. Death, an intangible character who seems to haunt most of his poems, and if his small moments of genius structure should follow him more closely in his other work.
I wonder if such a wondering sentence is too long for a poet's introduction.

The question is do I like Bruce Weigl's Unraveling Strangeness.

Sometimes.

For example:

Weigl's poem "My Pants" is gravely comical and beautiful and describes a few personal quirks of aging, the pleasures and pains of it. The structure is interesting with its use of white space and two line stanzas. The words are deceivingly simple. The flow is lolling and easy... until the sixth stanza when the subject unexpectedly changes from first person to second person, from recalling personal experience to asking the reader rhetorical questions. Perhaps Weigl is asking himself the question of "What are you going to do?" but there is no transition for warning for the subject change. For a mere two stanzas he turns the poem to enforce the idea that his personal experience is also happening to the reader, then leaves me wondering where I went in the poem because Weigl switches back to first person for the remainder of the poem.

The other problem I have with this particular poem is Weigl's comparison of a little boy to a bullet and a scream. He makes what I believe are awkward comparisons like this one throughout the book. Maybe a little boy being like a bullet or a scream hits home for someone else, and maybe I'm too dense or unimaginative, but it is my project, and I have to distinguish differing theories and practices on structure, language, subjects, etc. And considering that the rules of poetry are gray and fuzzy, a haze in the distance at best, taste and personal style play a major role. So I'm telling you what I like and what I don't like, which has little to do with whether Weigl is a good and bad poet.

Here are the things I dislike in most circumstances regarding poetry:

1. the use of "you," unless speaking to a character already mentioned. E.g.: You, Mother....

2. lack of personal information preceding the poetry. I like to know everything - places, people, events, social status - that the author mentions. It gives the poem a complete meaning. Gary Soto is very good at keeping the reader in-the-know, while Robley Wilson was terrible at it and Bruce Weigl is good at it sometimes.

3. reading about an experience that the author could never possibly experienced but writes as if he has.

Those are the only ones I've discovered so far. There are lots of things I like about poetry, and I'm tired.

Later I will write about my replacement poet for Robley Wilson, Robert Hershon.

Basalil

Joe, in a draft

2006-08-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

If you were a zephyr
that blew in August

You’d be a breeze of banjos
and awkward harmonies,

carrying the scent of sun-warmed
strawberries

And the sheepish crying of a boy,
fresh with the fear of bees and honeysuckle flowers.

-With much love,
Basalil

Billy Collins, You Led Me Astray

2006-07-26T16:32:00.000-07:00

In truth, I'm no good at mother's golden rule: If you don't have anything good to say, don't say it all. No, no good at all, especially when it involves writers.
In college, it seems that students are still children enough to twist their new-found knowledge into specific, though most likely fluid, opinions which they enjoy bashing into each other for mere reactions, myself included. I love arguing about F. Scott Fitzgerald's work. He makes my skin crawl.
Even if this phenomenon remains among students and filters out of them through time - the time when they are no longer hot-headed students, obviously - I still believe in breaking mother's golden rule when it's necessary, like, for an honors project. But no worries, Mother, I'll try to be elloquent.

In Billy Collin's Poetry 180, I read a most beautiful poem by Robley Wilson called "I Wish in the City of Your Heart." It's short, sensual, odd... and it excited me to read more. However, Billy must have picked the best of Robley Wilson, and the book I chose must have been either the leftover sludge or have misplaced its informative foreward, explaining why war was a main theme and why the author felt obliged to write on concentration camps and other subjects which I seriously question as personal experience. Maybe it's just my student taste, but I can believe in a poem when the poet makes it personal. You don't have to write a war story to capture my attention or sympathy or heart; you merely have to write a few beautiful words like Wilson did in "I Wish in the City of Your Heart." If I wasn't so ignorant on copyright laws, I'd lay out this fantastic poems right here, right now; I love it that much.

But Everything Paid For, Robley Wilson's 1999 collection of poetry, hurt me to read.

Wait, that's not elloquent enough for Mother.

Everything Paid For had many elements/techniques that made me groan and throw the book to the floor, which is truthful but still not elloquent. Sorry, Mother.

Oh my God, Lindsay gets to see Sufjan Stevens in concert in St. Louis in September and she just now told me. I have to check the internet to see if I can still get tickets and go. Oh man, I have to see Sufjan.
Sorry, I'll finish later. This is Sufjan we're talking about.

-Jess

The Man

2006-06-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

Most of my generation vaguely remembers Gary Soto as a short fiction writer who we had to read in late grade school or junior high. He was that one guy who sometimes used spanish words, forcing the kids who cared to delve into their emerging second language skills just to complete a sentence, even when the word we struggled minutes over was something as simple as amigo or abuela or adios (the one word we felt proud to know automatically as if we were Mexican ourselves). Who knew, however, that Gary Soto is actually The Man.
I'm currently reading New & Selected Poems by Gary Soto as part of my honors project. It's a thick book for poetry with an artistically flat cover - one I wouldn't be mesmerized by, in fact, probably not one I would even pick up off the shelf. And that's why I shouldn't look at covers. But the inside... the inside makes The Man. The Man owns words and makes words new. I have already stolen the preface title: Sizing Up the Sparrows. Soon, perhaps, I will be brilliant and write something as beautiful and no longer be a theif. But those skies look rather rusty.
The book is a dense 177 pages with poems divided into 7 chronological sections. So far my favorite section is "Black Hair" but here are some of my favorite poems, just in case you want something to Google:
"The Tale of Sunlight"
"The First"
"Her"
"The Widow Perez"
"Morning on This Street"
"The Trees That Change Our Lives"
"Heaven"
"Small Town with One Road"

And here's a little taste of Soto:

"I say it is enough/To be where the smells/Of creatures/Braid like rope/And to know if/The grasses rustle/It is only/A lizard passing."
from "The Space"

And this is why Soto is The Man and the first poet in my project.

I hope you are intrigued, just as I am.

Basalil

New Last Name, New Superman Movie, New Blog... Hold onto Your Bellybuttons, That's a Whole Lotta New

2006-06-14T19:53:00.000-07:00

Well, Basalil is now the fourth Zephyrs to ever grace this planet. That's right, I'm married, and who wouldn't want to inherit such an incredibly made-up last name? Zephyrs: like the Greek god of wind. It goes quite well with the similarly made-up first name Basalil. It also fits well with my real name: Jessica Zephyrs. Do you like it?

So I decided it is time to establish a new blog.

In an attempt to be more scholarly, globaly aware, and all-in-all out of the sticks, I will try to also establish a ring of local (Springfield, MO... maybe even an area as wide as the "midwest") writers and poets who exchange ideas and news and writing through blogs, and considering that most of the writers who have already committed their souls to this project have blogger accounts, a Blogger blog is, for no other reason than stated above, necessary. We'll see how this project falls apart.
(I'm a writer. I'm incapable of being optimistic.) :)

In a further attempt to bore my small audience and to keep myself on top of things, I will also update on my honors project which began last week and will end sometime in the spring of '07.
What's Basalil's honors project?
Oh, I knew you wanted to know. Well, in short I'm reading books by three comtemporary poets of my choosing, studying everything about their writing that I can think to study, interviewing them because they're still alive, and then writing about this process and findings. In the interim, I'll be writing my own poetry and about that process.
Man, that was sssoooo entertaining.

My uterus is schluffing (sp?). I bet that's more entertaining.

In other news:
I am reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, and it's amazing so far. (Yay, I got to use more hyperbolic adjectives/adverbs.)
I am looking for a job. Hint, hint, you Springfield employers. My skills: uterus battling.
Joe and I are planning a day hiking trip. For details, ask Joe. He's the one who's actually planning.
I make delicious quiche.
And flat bread.
Joe makes delicious coffee with lots of cool whip.

I'm losing the utero battle. I must go and defend the battlegrounds.

A la sinistra,

Basalil

"There will be no balls without meat." - Alton Brown from Good Eats