Feliz Cinco de Mayo

First let me start with a brief description of this day. Being of Mexican heritage, I’ve had to explain it on a regular basis. So, I thought I’d just give a quick rambling, if only to say: This day is not just about margaritas and tortilla chips (although I find nothing wrong with either of those things and hope to partake in both shortly).

The first thing that I find myself reminding people of is this: Cinco de Mayo is NOT Mexico's Independence Day (which is actually September 16th or midnight of the 15th depending one what you’re reading). Instead, it is in celebration of the day, May 5th, 1862, when 4,000 members of the Mexican Militia defeated 8,000 members of the French army in the town of Puebla. (Napoleon wanted to take over and install Maximilian as ruler of Mexico).

I didn’t have one of those blissed out pregnancies that some women do, but I did love my pre-natal yoga class. Besides the fact that it was good exercise and good relaxation, I got to go be pregnant with a bunch of other pregnant ladies. The first part of the class was spent saying how we felt, so the teacher could gear the class to what ailed us. One time everybody started saying what they refused to give up. The woman with tattoos wasn’t giving up sushi. The carpenter wasn’t giving up manicures. I refused to give up soft cheese. Camembert every day was my motto. (I also drank coffee and a glass of wine a day, and Maisie came out fine, of course.) Then we did the poses and vinyasas modified to accommodate our large bellies and got lots of energy and the kinks in our necks dekinked.

The only drawback of the class for me was that during the final relaxation, the teacher would read a poem. She’d let us commune with our fetuses, our third eyes and our narcissistic tendencies to our heart’s content for five minutes, and then, out with the poem, after which we were supposed to zone out again. Everyone else loved this part, but it drove me nuts. Prior to the poem I’d be going, “oh, no, here it comes.” Then she’d read Rumi. And my brain would start up. “Is that a good poem?” “Is that a good translation?” “What about the syntax?” “I wonder if you just switched those two words if it would work better.” We were supposed to meditate on what the poem said, and so of course I’d get onto my little mental soap-box and start railing against people who think of poems as mini-philosophy lectures. It was even worse if she picked a poem I liked. One time she read something by Wendell Berry which seemed perfectly made, a poem of great clarity. I was pleased by it. And when I hear a poem I like, I want to sit up, square my shoulders and get to work, not lie there melting into the ground.

I never relaxed until I got out of the room of warm soothing colors, away from the gentle supportive voice of the yoga teacher, the mystical truths of the poet, down into the street and the everyday world of bitchy, blissful prose.

Commenting on my post on Paradise Lost below, Bill Knott wrote

"…I used to listen via a walkperson to a tape of the
first couple books of PL as read by the British actor Anthony
Quayle,

but irritatingly he didn’t read the linebreaks which
made me usually snatch the earphones out in exasp."

Yes, why are actors so often lousy readers of poetry?

I, too, have returned from AWP, exhausted by the experience. I fear that I have little to report of interest beyond the social gossip that such an occasion usually affords—but in the interest of generating some comments about audio-works of the avant-garde, I am going to include the links to the works on my playlist for the panel entitled "Listen to This"—a panel originally advertised to include Kenneth Goldsmith, the proprietor of UbuWeb, but that instead has included me, serving as his avatar. I believe that my selections evoke the spirit of his website, and I encourage you to check them out….

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Last Friday I had the privilege of sitting as one of the guest judges at the final round of the All Girl Poetry Slam. Sponsored by Girlstory, a multi-cultural, multi-generational women’s writing collective (and an organization created out a residency at another important arts organization, Community Word Project), this venue is all about fostering girl power, and the December 14 event determined the poetry slam team on its way to the Brave New Voices Poetry Slam this summer in Washington D.C.

Approximately a month ago, around the end of September, I flew to Bergen, Norway, in order to perform at the Audiatur Festival—a multilingual extravaganza for the avant-garde, at which many celebrated performers of both phonically-based poetry and constraint-based poetry attended, including the likes of Tomomi Adachi (from Japan), Caroline Bergvall (from Britain), Leevi Lehto (from Finland), and Jacques Roubaud (from France).

Organizers of the event have now made available, online, many of the audiovisual recordings from the event….

I try not to think about dying much.

Whenever I do, naive as it may be, I dismiss it as something that happens to other people, usually in very spectacular ways. A longago plague sweeps through eastern Europe. A car bomb explodes in a crowded bazaar. A distraught lover climbs over a rail and leaps into the drink. Splashy demises always seem so far away, so detached from the realm.

Then there's what I consider "regular" dying, which pretty much consists of extremely old people who smile in their sleep and just drift away..or obscenely attractive people with broken hearts, dwindling to mere air, surrounded by a loving beside circle of family and friends. This type of dying is usually accompanied by music.

I never think of poets succumbing. I can't wrap my head around notebooks of unfinished stanzas, empty stages, slim volumes with blank pages. The poets I grew up with and around are so utterly necessary, so vital. I'm not sure how I'd process my life without their help. I never thought I'd have to.

But lately poets have been dying, just like ordinary people.

A jazz combo played short standards during the period between each contestant. Scott Simon’s face was too far away for me to think of him as anything but a voice as he read the names of the young people coming on stage to perform. He was witty, as completely giddy about the proceedings as he does when he is interviewing someone who is supposed to be funny on the radio. It is charming, even if not always funny. The Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University somewhere in the middle of DC is packed to the brim with parents, relatives and a large contingent of supporters for the performers from Maryland, Virginia, and DC. They are noisy, enthusiastic. It is the kind of atmosphere that the really enthusiastic planners and boosters of the event will describe as being like any high school basketball game. That would be an exaggeration, but one can understand hyperbole—after all, the subject is a poetry recital contest during which high school aged kids, most of them with clear aspirations to be actors, recite poems by often dead people and some living poetic geniuses.

I don’t go to church, so poetry readings are the closest thing I have to a communal spiritual experience. I think something happens when we come together and honor one another with our attention and break breath. I sometimes define poetry as “chiseled breathing”, but maybe for the purpose of metaphor, the better word is “leavened”. Poetry is leavened breathing.

One cool thing about being a poet in Los Angeles, (a strange positive that perhaps came from being in the shadow of Hollywood, faraway from the power brokers of the literary world), was that when I met other literary writers I was genuinely excited, and there was a lot of space for unconventional things to happen organically. For instance, in 1999, I was hosting an event at Beyond Baroque to raise money to take six high school poets to a teen poetry festival in New Mexico, and one of the featured readers, an actor/writer named Sarah Koskoff, performed Plath’s Daddy. She didn’t just read the poem; she embodied it. Fiction writer Aimee Bender happened to be in the audience and came up with the idea of organizing a Dead Poets Slam, featuring Los Angeles stage actors and performers who would embody the work of dead poets. A couple weeks later, I was in Aimee’s living room, with several UC-Irvine grads (Genevieve and Alice Sebold—pre-Lovely Bones), mapping out potential teams; we finally decided on the Natural Deaths vs. the Unnatural Deaths. We rifled through sprawled anthologies, looking for dead poets to bring back to life. I can’t imagine an event like that happening, in the same small, funky way, in any other American city.