to-do: drop everything, see this

The Devil Came on Horseback

secret passage, hidden treasure

The night before I came to visit, the artists at Diving Swallow Tattoo opened their space up for a showing of Tibetan thangkas. One particularly rich, dark thangka was hung up toward the front of the gallery space, on the wall adjacent to the dragon-handled door and the neon flowers lighting the front window. And while Marie Wadman was busy mixing custom inks and prepping her station, I stood magnetized to the painting. Avalokiteshvara was the bodhisattva’s name. I knew just enough about Tibetan Buddhism to have passed my Problem of God and assorted world religion classes at Georgetown, but beyond that could be considered your typical Berkeley dabbler, a spiritual tire-kicker with—at best—an intellectual, recreational interest (though I happened to be midway through a simple, helpful book called Change of Heart at the time).

In the thrall of endorphins that lasted the next few hours, I sat propped on the pillows slung over a pub chair as Marie worked on my back. And I thought about the thangka, about this thousand-armed icon, about the place of spirituality in the world, in my world, the use of it. And I started to turn over and over the outside hope that maybe Avalokiteshvara arrived for a reason, as if he revealed a passage sliding open just as I set eyes on it.

Working at a place like North Atlantic, I walk within so many different communities—martial arts, healing & health, literary, and of course spiritual. The result of having spent my days supporting the work of these folks, so many of them with decades of experience refining their practices, is, in this case, instant, intimate access to the full story of the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

Avalokiteshvara, so disturbed by the depthless sadness of the world, committed to freeing all sentient beings from the suffering of our world. Looking around himself at all the sorrow that persisted despite his best efforts, he fell into despair. In form with the fantastic narrative turns of so many parables, Avalokiteshvara’s head then split into thousands of pieces. When Amitabha Buddha restored him, he gave him eleven heads with which he could hear the cries of souls in samsara. Avalokiteshvara tried to reach out to them all, but his two arms shattered, inspiring Amitabha Buddha to give him a thousand arms, with an eye on each palm, to reach out to those suffering in the world.

I am going today to pick up my thangka of Avalokiteshvara. I am impossibly excited about it, about setting up an honorable little place in my new home for him. My relationship to him, as well as my increasing awareness of respect, compassion, detachment, feels like a smooth rock in my pocket, a treasure for the moment and for the ages. I’m a lucky kid!

notes (of oak and cassis) from underground

“The Grim Eater” in Pixar’s Ratatouille, in my view, begins the movie as a symbol of all that needs to change in culinary criticism—snobbery, ego (indeed, Ego is the critic’s surname), stringency, and, most of all, isolation. If he is not alone in his funereal office writing damning reviews of doomed restaurants, he is dining alone with palpable disdain.

Look, by contrast, at the critics of Top Chef. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, here’s BRAVO’s description: “A group of twelve aspiring chefs, both professionally trained and self-taught, will compete in a series of culinary challenges. Each week, one contestant will be eliminated by a group of well-known judges. The winning chef will receive…”—yes, yes, yes, they receive lots of prizes. But what’s left unsaid there is the most welcome development that America’s socially anemic foodie culture has seen since Julia. Huge groups of folks are shown coming together, eating together, talking together.

We need only note that Top Chef’s ridiculously sharp and sexy Padma Lakshmi jilted Salman Rushdie shortly after heartthrob gadabout Tony Bourdain guest-judged an episode alongside her to understand that food is, in fact, the music of love. Sharing it is a binding human ritual. Feels as if we folks in the U.S. today are alone in our oblivion to this primal need. Even on a recent trip to ancient Roman ruins of the San Sebastiani catacombs (Peter and Paul—Bible, not band—were buried there), I visited a huge subterranean room in which Christians are said to have held intimate feasts for their beloved dead. After they finished eating, they etched benedictions into the wall. They broke bread. Life had meaning worth recognizing and recording together.

The good news: underground dinner parties are, if you will, on the rise. Never heard of them? Stay tuned for a forthcoming article I’ve written on this phenomenon. I recently attended one such event hosted in a gorgeous live-work space in SF’s Mission district. I don’t think I overstate it when I hope that these parties may bring Americans the closest we’ve come yet to a legitimately Italian piazza experience.

I’ll distinguish the eating experience this way. Saturday night: I’m at Bar Bambino, where, engaged solely with the fabulous company I kept at my private table, I ignored every other soul in the room. Come Sunday, on the other hand, I’m awash in the open energy of forty souls gathered to enjoy an inventive seven-course meal of fresh, organic food all together and to scratch out some new cross-hatches in their already live social networks. More coming on this soon. In the meantime, here’s what I ate:

Poblano pepper taquito
Roasted poblano, avocado, crooknecks, coconut meat with a sauce of cilantro, lime, tamarind, seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, flax)

Tres gazpachos

Ginger tofu skewers with drunken morels
Ginger-tekka-sichimi tofu, ume-shiso kanten, sea palm, and morel

Tahini porcini rapini greens

Composed salad
Cipolline onion, haricort vert, chiogga beets, Bermuda Triangle chevre, filberts, cresses with a kumquat, tarragon, and fennel confit

Jeweled baby basmati
Basmati with barberry, mulberry, tonka bean, saffron, orange blossoms, pistachio

Stonefruit ten ways
Plum: raw, frozen, thyme
White peach: hot and cold gelee with coconut water
Poached yellow peach tart with apricot ice cream
White nectarine: raw, frozen, rose geranium
Yellow nectarine: raw, confit with candied kumquat

(That last one—stonefruit ten ways—sent me scrambling back to the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Even the jilted literati have to admit: there is a certain inimitable pleasure to a menu—look at those noble accents and lucid, inescapable rhythms. It can only be poetry.)

so jealous

I stand here cooking. The sage and prosciutto crisp up and the two tilapia fillets are just done. Her white zin poured, my Ariel chilled. We’re about ready and Miss Liz Hille circles the kitchen, hungry hawk. I have known her for a few years now—we wrote fiction and set our first darts of literary criticism sailing together at Bennington Writing Seminars—and I have stepped wordlessly out of her life multiple times to etch out runes in the soot of my solitary cave. Again this time, she’s there, easy, when I emerge. I dish up fish, potatoes. I listen as she recounts climbing toward meaning after having had her students read Hills Like White Elephant and I realize what I’m feeling: jealousy. However many light-years apart our preferences in style may be (her Bukowski to my Coetzee, her Gaitskill to my Austen), I envy the students who get to work with a reader like her.

It’s not that I lack literary outlets. I can—and do—lob titles with whip-quick bibliophiles every day. In fact, I realize I spend the greater part of most days devoted to books in one way or another—reading, editing, rereading, writing, throwing, weeping into, studying, browsing, copying, promoting, reveling, reimagining—and so I necessarily talk to and work with lots of like-minded humans, all communing around this momentary art. Liz, however, has some simple witchcraft in her way of reading. We should all be so free of pretensions, but engaged to the depths. I toast genuine curiosity, the possession of fierce opinions without a single cutting edge, and most of all, shameless rapacity. But I can’t help but worry her kitchen might get crowded. Can you blame me?

Here’s an excerpt of Liz’s latest.

those who can't do

for Library Journal

Kohl, Herbert. Painting Chinese: A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth. Aug. 2007. Bloomsbury USA. 176 p. bibliog. b/w illust. ISBN-13: 978-1-59691-052-2; ISBN-10: 1-59691-052-6. $19.95.

Wilder, Robert. Tales from the Teacher’s Lounge. Aug. 2007. Delacorte Press. 309 p. ISBN-13: 978-0-385-33927-8; ISBN-10: 0-385-33927-5. $23.00.

Robert Wilder, having left behind an advertising career to work as a teacher, presents classroom tales so tall that they function less as reliable memoir than dramatic parody of classroom-as-asylum, with much of the (laugh-out-loud) humor derived at the expense of young students’ attitudes, actions, and disabilities. Each of the four thematic parts (teacher training, student days, family and education, and a final selection loosely bound by the idea of a teaching community) depicts more stammering, twitching, swearing, and screaming than the average school could abide without being shut down. So while the essays in Tales from the Teacher’s Lounge exhibit the author’s knack for hyperbole and well-timed, outrageous hilarity, that entertainment value is boldly derived from disturbing classroom scenarios.

Worlds apart stylistically and thematically, Painting Chinese shows Herbert Kohl as he retires after forty-seven years as a professor and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice at University of San Francisco and takes up the art of calligraphy. Having inadvertently registered for a class in the company of five- to seven-year-old students, Kohl details the technique he learns along the way (the use of water and ink, ways of holding the brush, tiers of subject matter for the beginning student, and the importance of copying the masters), but more importantly peppers these basics with broader lessons from a lifelong student of the world. Kohl analyzes his own life with curiosity and candor. Drawing upon admirable readings and research, Kohl offers original, sensitive reflections, as when he considers the life of the Monkey King, the impact of Mao Zedong on the life of his mentor, the wisdom of Wang Wei, and the connections between Chinese painting and Taoism. Though sentimental at the odd interval, Kohl’s willingness to inquire within makes him a worthy role model for any student.

let them eat cake (fire?)

Okay, one more thing before I go. In a recent article in the NYRB, Max Rodenbeck leads into an exploration of Lebanon & its discontents with a quote from an unnamed Hezbollah spokesperson. It is as follows: "This country is like a cake. On the top it is cream. Underneath it is fire."

Meh? A journalist should be able to distinguish quotable wheat from compostable chaff. True enough, Rodenbeck is good enough to note that the metaphor is "clumsy," but then he goes on to unpack it anyway, pondering that while "Lebanon whets appetites with its gorgeous landscapes, clement weather, energetic people, and wonderful food, trying to consume too much of it tends to bring on heartburn" and that the "country's infernally complex ingredients seem chemically incapable of melding into a digestible dish."

Oy. Hyperextended metaphors taste like supermarket ice cream cake with that gel icing and filling made of capsaicin and wasabi peas.

An escape to gelato never sounded better! See you in July.

all the gelato i can eat

I've finished revising a short story just in time to fly off the continent and spend a spell riding horses in Sardinia. It will be like Chariots of Fire, only a better soundtrack and clearer water:



Here's my illustration of what I'll be doing, aside from ambling with ponies:



Well, I will be more relaxed than that. I can't use anything but that spraycan in Photoshop. It's my very own airbrush. Very classy, very Atlantic-City-meets-Sardinian-rock-formation.

And one more thing: I just rec'd an email from one of my authors. She asked whether a given photo would work for her author photo. She described it as the read-my-book-or-I'll-spank-you picture. How can an editor say no to such a photo? Love the people I work with.

Still, the horses are whinnying. Ciao, ragazzi.

the originals

On my way to represent BADRAP in the SF Pride Parade and it reminded me--I never posted this review.

for Library Journal

Gallo, Marcia M. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. Nov. 2006. Avalon Publishing. 320 p. bibliog. appendix of interviews. endnotes. ISBN-13: 978-0-78671-634-0; ISBN-10: 0-7867-1634-7. $26.95.

Almost fifteen years before the Stonewall Riots brought the issue of gay rights into the mainstream press, six San Francisco women were busy organizing a way for lesbians to meet safely behind closed doors. As a result, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), a secret social club for lesbians, was born in 1955. In an exhaustively researched chronicle of the organization and its work, Marcia Gallo presents the DOB in its full context, from FBI surveillance and the dangers the founding women faced collaborating during the McCarthy era to GLBT Historical Society’s ultimate preservation of DOB meeting minutes, records, and letters. Gallo addresses both the racial tensions and political advancements within the organization, as well as the historic significance of their newsletter The Ladder. Relying heavily on personal interviews, Different Daughters depicts the development of the DOB and the courageous ways members networked with other homophile organizations. Gallo proves an unyielding researcher, honoring this bold, diverse group of women who led the organization until the last chapter dissolved in 1978. Recommended for all public and academic libraries. Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA

speaking of silence ...

Paretsky, Sara. Writing in an Age of Silence. May 2007. Verso. 158 p. endnotes. ISBN 978-1-84467-122-9. $22.95

for Library Journal


Writing in an Age of Silence, catalogued as an autobiographical essay collection, develops as a conscientious objection to the new American McCarthyism. Not that Sara Paretsky, bestselling author of a dozen novels, lets die-hard mystery fans down. She shares her development process for V.I. Warshawski, her famous protagonist and South Side Chicago private eye, and compares Warshawski with male counterparts Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Paretsky offers a feminist interpretation of the loner hero’s code of justice and an analysis of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett’s influence on her work. Still, the final—and most political—chapter resonates most. A volunteer in Gage Park during Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1966 summer march and a feminist since the second wave crested, Paretsky renounces contemporary U.S. policies in a gutsy inventory of the civil rights infringements that threaten her livelihood, including unlawful search and seizure and arrest & detainment without habeas corpus. Paretsky’s vocational purpose finds its best expression in her apt Tennyson epigraph: ‘though much is taken, much abides.’ Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.-—Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA

totally bitchin'

Jervis, Lisa and Andi Zeisler, eds. bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine. Aug. 2006. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 256p. resource list. ISBN-10: 0-374-11343-2. ISBN-13: 978-0-374-11343-8. $15.

for Library Journal

bitchfest represents an alternating mix of the most hilarious, alarming, and unexpected essays from Bitch Magazine's ten-year tenure. Over three-quarters of the works fall into the decade's latter half and, with the exception of an approving pre-scandal profile of Martha Stewart, all retain complete cultural currency. About-Face founder Kathy Bruin journals on the eve of her celebrated Don't Feed the Models postering campaign. Keely Savoie presents a brilliant journalistic brief on the 400+ animal species documented in homosexual relationships. Shauna Swartz turns out an indelible account of the severe life of reality porn actresses. bitchfest writers, a mix of thought leaders and unknown activists, share a talent for asking thorny questions: how can Westerners distinguish between American cosmetic labiaplasty and African genital mutilation? Why the preponderance of articles positioning housework as the exercise au courant? Why can't female Cosmo readers admit they're attracted to, rather than jealous of, waifs on the glossy covers? Readers new to the feminist quarterly will find the articles, almost without exception, original, intelligent, and well written. This compilation has staying power. Highly recommended for all libraries.-Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA

such as i was, such as i was

I previously mentioned Ionesco. It's always a pleasure to return to this poem. I found the translation from the French in an old Iowa Review on my shelves--the poem possesses that rereadability that Bloom (or was it Frost?) suggested determines a poem's worth.

Souvenir

At my wits' ends,
in a haze.

So out of it, I stuck
my right foot in a pot,

neither alert: so I stepped
out with my left.

I have been traipsing, though,
light as air, through the clouds.

If the stars should make me stumble
I would pick them up like apples.

I loved myself, such as
I was; such as I was.

heaney & joel

Heaney's an elegant alternative to that Billy Joel song Just the Way You Are: "You always have my unspoken passion, though I might not seem to care." (Yes, I've used that.)

Scaffolding

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

foodstuffs

My old refrigerator & I have parted ways. Oh the memories of my roomy magic box of icy air. I kept this poem in there. Now that I've got a halfling fridge, I keep the poem over the sink. Unlike the poem next to it, this one lacks lamination. Alas, it's taken a beating. Yet there it remains.

Eating Poetry

by Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

wm stafford, as promised

Please find your way to the audio of Stafford reading this. His voice is shot through with this present, stoic resignation. Unforgettable.

Traveling Through the Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

pro wrestler, orr, elizabeth

I keep telling myself that very soon I will stop reading The New York Times Book Review.

And I think if David Orr hadn't redeemed the rag with an ardent paean to one of my heroes, Elizabeth Bishop, I'd have canceled last week when the editors decided to celebrate Thomas Hackett's Slaphappy, a "commendable" treatise on...professional wrestling.

Whew. Okay....at least there's Bishop. A good poem rides on its own melting, right? Yes, yes. This, especially in her most famous and accessible poem, The Fish, is an ideal metaphor for Elizabeth Bishop's work.

And the swell that follows, at least for Orr, is tremendous; he begins his long song (this is a review of one of those dodgy collections of bits and scraps the poet never wanted published) with this: "You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79)." Oh my. Microsoft, Rachael Ray,--and Elizabeth Bishop?

But Elizabeth is what matters here. (Isn't that always the case?) From what I've heard recorded, Elizabeth Bishop had a complete lack of charisma reading her work. And this is a real shame because her words are so clarified, so intelligent, so sensory, and the significance deepens by virtue of allusion, figurative hints, shape, color. I tend to like theatrical readers -- Yeats, Millay, Auden, Sandburg. Then again, I cried when I first heard the very understated William Stafford read his Traveling Through the Dark so subtlely. So maybe the challenge here is to do what Borges insisted -- not read in a low voice. Not read silently. Read this aloud. Loud. Better than Bishop would.

The Moose

by Elizabeth Bishop

For Grace Bulmer Bowers

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering. Gone.
The Tantramar marshes
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night. Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative. "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."

Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

wise and otherwise

donald hall & i talked here and there at bennington, but i was too shy ever to engage him in person with anything but either quick-solve poetic puzzlements -- so i wrote him a letter instead.

even his letters are suffused with the strong hall personality -- rascally, suspect, farmy, funny.
i think it was PBS that ran a documentary on the life interrupted with his wife jane kenyon, who died too too early (not that there's an on-time or too late). he has written so much abt her and their life. elegiac stuff is so often hard for me to swallow, but i was in this auditorium early in my grad school career with all these strangers and as i watched the documentary, i just cried and cried and cried. i had to leave.

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birchwood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

-- Jane Kenyon

lost in translation

Two translations of Wislawa Szymborska's poetry. These two were my awakening as to what a difference a translator makes. First the version I prefer ... translated by the omnipresent Clare Cavanagh (and Stanislaw Baranczak). I think I mucked up the the line breaks--sorry abt that.

The Terrorist, He's Watching

The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen twenty
Now it's just thirteen sixteen.
There's still time for some to go in,
And some to come out.
The terrorist has already crossed the street.
The distance keeps him out of danger,
And what a view--just like the movies.
A woman in a yellow jacket, she's going in.
A man in dark glasses, he's coming out.
Teen-agers in jeans, they're talking.
Thirteen seventeen and four seconds.
The short one, he's lucky, he's getting on a scooter,
But the tall one, he's going in.
Thirteen seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl, she's walking along with a green ribbon in her hair.
But then a bus suddenly pulls in front of her.
Thirteen eighteen. The girl's gone.
Was she that dumb, did she go in or not,
We'll see when they carry them out.
Thirteen nineteen. Somehow no one's going in.
Another guy, fat, bald, is leaving, though.
Wait a second, looks like he's looking
For something in his pockets and
At thirteen twenty minus ten seconds
He goes back in for his crummy gloves.
Thirteen twenty exactly. This waiting, it's taking forever.
Any second now.
No, not yet.
Yes, now. The bomb, it explodes.

Then here's the one that I found by Dennis O'Driscoll...almost as if they're two entirely different poems with only the subject matter in common.

The One Twenty Pub

The bomb is primed to go off at one twenty.
A time-check: one sixteen.
There's still a chance for some to join
the pub's ranks, for others to drop out.

The terrorist watches from across the street.
Distance will shield him
from the impact of what he sees:

A woman, turquoise jacket on her shoulder,
enters; a man with sunglasses departs.
Youths in tee-shirts loiter without intent.
One seventeen and four seconds.
The scrawny motorcyclist, revving up
to leave, won't believe his luck;
but the tall man steps straight in.

One seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl, over there with the walkman
... now the bus has cut her off.
One eighteen exactly.
Was she stupid enough to head inside?
Or wasn't she? We'll know before long,
when the dead are carried out.

It's one nineteen.
Nothing much to report
until a muddled barfly hesitates,
fumbles with his pockets, and, like
a blasted fool, stumbles back
at one nineteen and forty seconds
to retrieve his goddamn cap.

One twenty
How time drags when ...
Any moment now.
Not yet.
Yes.
Yes,
there
it
goes.

poetry, slam

news:

Grolier Bookstore, which has been around for 51 years, was for many years the only bookstore in America devoted solely to poetry. Oy, hard not to get depressed reading the announcement:

"As many of you know, the lease of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, Inc. ends on March 31st. Harvard Real Estate offered me a very generous subsidy on the rent and a two-year lease with an option to renew. Unfortunately, the amount was beyond my means. HRE suggested that I sell the lease when I found a buyer. The buyer has been found, accepted the terms, and is now the owner. As he is out of town at the moment, I have agreed to maintain the shop until whatever date in March is decided upon.

... I finally realize that my stewardship of the Grolier had come to a natural end. After fifty-one years of involvement (my ownership being thirty-one), I have relinquished it."

riotgrrrls, alphabetically

Heywood, Leslie L., Ed. The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, Vols I & II. Nov. 2005. Greenwood Press. Vol. 1: 423 p; Vol. 2: 515 p. bibliog. illus. index. ISBN: 0-313-33133-2 (Set); 0-313-33134-0 (Vol. 1); 0-313-33135-9 (Vol. 2). $199.95.

for Library Journal

The second volume of Leslie Heywood’s feminist encyclopedia set, The Women’s Movement Today, is twice as useful as the first. While the first provides quite a limited listing of third-wave entries, the second is more informative: 515 pages culled directly from luminaries’ landmark books and magazine articles.

These selections resonate with a message common in most variations on third-wave themes: contemporary feminism thrives as polemics in praxis. Within Heywood’s second volume, frontrunners Rebecca Walker, Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy Richards, Ariel Gore, and most other leading third-wave feminists debate the agenda: cultural, legislative, and electoral activism; racial politics, globalization, and emergent technologies; motherhood; the wage gap and social justice; and the fallacy of the dominant male jock.

Noted editors, authors, and activists such as Lisa Jervis and Anita Harris refine the very definition of third-wave feminism and its distinction from the ostensible postfeminist age—recalibrating social, sexual, racial, chronological, technological, and economic variables to strike a new balance in feminist objectives.

These thinkers write aggressively, addressing issues of women, race, and class, as when Michelle Tea dismisses Barbara Ehrenreich’s undercover working-class reportage as intellectual noblesse oblige. We find Susan Bordo critiquing the cult of youth & beauty as she pulls apart the empire of images and the Guerilla Girls comically protesting women’s marginalization in their “Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art.”

The weaker of the two volumes, the first, an encyclopedia of names, issues, and events, buckles under its organizational irregularities, including categories too general for practical use (education, media, sports, visual art) and omitting from the list of entries several topics well worth inclusion: ecofeminism, erotica, International Women’s Day, lesbianism, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Title IX, for example. Categorization flaws notwithstanding, the two volumes still dovetail exceptionally well as a sound response to the common quandary over where to start one’s feminist education.

Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries.—Elizabeth Kennedy, Berkeley, CA

habits: waiting, more waiting

Why wait when not absolutely forced to do so?

Here is Marilyn Hacker's poem. Feels like an indictment. And I think I'm pretty glad about that.

Ghazal: Waiting

What follows when imagination’s not inspired by waiting,
body and spirit rendered sick and tired by waiting?

Wrinkles, stock market losses, abcessed teeth, rejection slips:
some of the benefits acquired by waiting.

Taught from childhood that patience is a virtue,
she thought that she could get what she desired by waiting.

History, a child at the chapter’s cusp
can only find out what transpired by waiting.

Does anyone escape alienated labor’s
cycle of being hired, exploited, made redundant, fired, by waiting?

He rolls a pen like a chess-piece between thumb and forefinger:
he won’t emerge from the morass in which he’s mired by waiting.

If poetry’s imagination’s daughter,
didn’t someone say that she was sired by waiting?

She raised her children, wrote at dawn, ignored the factions,
arrived at being read, remembered and admired by waiting.

Once a pair of lovers downed shots in a Chelsea bar.
their nerves and fantasies hot-wired by waiting.

Sweating, shackled and blindfolded in a basement,
will I get out, the hostage (of whom) inquired, by waiting?