Word Gatherer: Life in a Time of Saturn Rising

We live in The Lucky House.  We are five women (varying ages, backgrounds, regions).  We support each other & help each other procrastinate.  & we’re thankful we don’t live in the house where you can’t put anything wet, dry, hot, or sharp on the kitchencounter.  Also, if I perch my laptop on my knees & move my pelvis up to the sky, I can steal wireless to write to you:-)  Such are the gifts of this house.

Overheard at Lucky House in the last 24 hours:

~ It’s like we’re on a ship and we’re all helping each other steer ahead.

~ It feels like we’re crossing the sahara desert & we’re a long way from the end. 
~ It feels like exam time (said my roommate waking up at 5am this morning to begin her draft).

~ I wish I were here during fiction week where they get to party & socialize & network.

~ on why Sharon Olds doesn’t seem nervous & only gives herself 2 hours before workshop to write a poem whereas the rest of us are mumbling to ourselves all night: it’s like I’m a burrowing scrabbling animal trying to make it to sunlight & she’s already over there basking in the sunlight.

I don’t think it’s the producing part that’s causing stress but more the fact that we have to share them with other people & sound not like our inner demons have taken over.  Brenda Hillman refers to them as "blobs" instead of poems.  But the cool thing is that the teachers have to do it too.  Jimmy Santiago Baca gave an amazing craft talk yesterday, talking about how poetry came into his life while he was in jail.  What I really appreciated was the vulnerability he shared with us about being nervous around writers, nervous about giving us a craft talk & that he hadn’t written in 2 years until he came here & started writing with us!

Yes, you guessed it, I’m at poetry boot camp aka Squaw Valley Poetry
Workshop & yes, I’m procrastinating from writing my poem for
tomorrow.  I took a deadly train-bus-train-bus combination overnight
from Union Station in LA to Truckee, California starting Friday early
evening until Saturday late afternoon.  Though Amtrak is always late,
it also guarantees that your connection will wait for you (which may
account for one of the lateness factors).  I slept & slept &
slept & spent a brief period of time revising my manuscript &
slept & slept & slept some more.  There was a brief 2 hour
stint where people were getting antsy because a freight train had
killed somebody and we had to wait for the rails to get "cleaned" — I
wanted to say 2 hours is nothing in perspective, but I was too sleepy.
Finally, picked up & dropped off at a really SWANKY house with a
SWANKY bathtub where I am staying with 4 other women.  The owners of
the house don’t normally lock the doors, which is just as well because
apparently none of our keys work anyway.  It’s gorgeous here with the
mountains & the conifers (I learned this today about the birds
& the trees on the nature walk), but I haven’t had as much time as
I thought to go on hikes or do much of anything besides workshopping
because we have to produce one brand new poem every day.  Our house
seems to have a torturous stretch of time after dinner when everyone is
stressed about production & there’s an elaborate pick-up system
which involved us leaving poems & zip drives & disks in a
little basket by our front door when the poetry elves break into every
morning around 7:15am to steal our poems.

For the past 3 days, I have been driving non-stop in southern
California in the search for a new home.  Riverside is very brown;
breathtaking towering brown mountains, brown fields, brown dust,
brown-ness everywhere.  On the plus side, almost everyone is brown:-)

I have:
**
been told I sound like California, not "straight" like Massachusetts by
a self-professed Jersey girl who hates California because people are
unstable except for in the OC & Fisherman’s Wharf.  I decided
against her corporate-style gated house & it wasn’t because she
repeatedly called me at 3am in the morning & I couldn’t get her off
the phone.

** met some notable landlords — an African drummer
with a temptingly green front yard; a bald white guy who reminded me of
my old landlord The Dark Lord; a young mother whose house used to be a
nursery & had fire extinguishers perched up everywhere.

**
seen a house I originally thought was an antique shop with mannequins
attached to a trailer in the back crammed full of stuff, attached to a
patio with 4 washers & dryers, attached to an inlaw which came with
more fridges & 2 boys & a daughter hiding in the back.  When
she said, I have everything you could possibly want here, I thought
there couldn’t possibly be space for 2 packrats in that house with so
many attachments.

** ate at the majority of Asian establishments in the area with the exception of the sketchy-looking "Chinese" restaurants.

** rode in a golf cart around the campus on a campus tour

Even directionally challenged me has a pretty good grasp of the area after driving up & down the main drag 50 times a day.

Prayer Before Orienting West:
– I’m searching for a new homey corner where I can write, cook, flirt, laugh, soup, read, honey, dream, juice, sun.

Where I’m coming from, the last month:
–
{Western MA} a five day sacred space for people of color to become
quiet and still so they can listen to themselves, cleanse their bodies
and spirit.  Where I prayed for my friends (some of whom called me the
same day I prayed for them, but of course, I couldn’t pick up my
phone:-)), for people who weren’t my friends anymore, for people I used
to love, for people I’ve loved and fought and challenged and loved
again.  One of the instructions during lovingkindness meditation was to
choose a "neutral person" to pray for and I picked this beautiful man
in front of me with a wide smile who felt like family.  (I didn’t
realize when I first picked him that it was somebody we weren’t
supposed to like already, just thought that it had to be a stranger).
I didn’t know his name, but he smiled at me every time I sat down &
I tried to pick someone more neutral, but I couldn’t.  I kept picking
him as my neutral person.  When the retreat was over, he gave me a big
bear hug & he just felt like someone I had known from another
lifetime. 

– {P-town, Fine Arts Work Center} ferry, clams,
gayness & skin-ness, a crazy summertime resort town, ocean, ocean,
ocean, sand everywhere.  Instruction to be wild Buddhas, visual
artists, the opposite of what we always thought we were.  I kept
thinking, this is where my writing can bring me, this is where my
writing can bring me.

– {William Joiner Center, Boston} I’ve
never gotten the opportunity to take a translation seminar, which was
the best thing I took away from the workshop.  It’s like struggling
with the ghost and soul and spirit of another poet, who has laid down
the bones of a poem for you to work with.  It made me want to work on
the languages I have buried within me, to try harder to untwist my
tongue, to read things in their original beauty.

– {Summer
Solstice Writers’ Conference, Boston} - the beginning of my summer
writing journey. Blessed to have the chance to work with Cornelius
Eady, who told me that he felt I was close to finishing the end of my
manuscript project (after only reading 8 pages of my poems)!  Thanks,
Cornelius.

My poem, Tale, has found a home in CRATE, UC Riverside’s MFA Literary
Magazine.  You can order a copy at: http://crate.ucr.edu/ or I can get
copies for $10).

I took it as another sign from the universe —
When
I sent those poems in, I didn’t know I would be making plans to head
there soon.  It seems all around me, people are investing their
energies into fertile ground, making themselves whole, right, happy.  I
feel lucky.