wild

I didn’t go anywhere to speak of today, but at home, here, there’s a manmade lake and a stream that runs through the apartment complex. Going to do my laundry and walking to the recycling bins, I counted seven ducks and four turtles (who swam over to me when I looked in the water). Heads up, they honestly looked like they had something to say. Then three koi. But the cool thing was three juvenile black-crowned night herons who have been getting their legs in the low branches and water-edges. They flew -  at about my eye-level - past the laundry room this afternoon. It’s almost too wild here. And it’s just Irvine.  I’m expecting to see, again tonight, the pair of raccoons I keep running into in the parking lot.  Every time I see them they look like they just got out of a car and are on their way home fast to catch something on TV, but probably not the Olympics. Gary Snyder writes in The Practice of the Wild that “[p]erhaps one should not talk (or write) too much about the wild world: it may be that it embarrasses other animals to have attention called to them.” I’ll stop now.

 

for kenya

One of my friends, Kenya, asked me to remember her today and make her laugh. The laughing part is too hard for me, but the remembering part is easy. When we meet for lunch every few months, midway between where we both work and usually in a hamburger place, she always has a story that tells me exactly what one of her three kids is like.  I never have one to match, but I love to hear the stories that tell how we’re all like each other or like one of our parents or not like anyone else - at least yet - to whom we’re related. I’ve been reading Hawthorne’s “American Note-Books” and here’s this that reminded me of Kenya, or the circa 1850, white, male, eastern, formal version of her: ”One of the children, drawing a cow on the blackboard says, ‘I’ll kick this leg out a little more,’ - a very happy energy of expression, completely identifying herself with the cow; or perhaps, as the cow’s creator, conscious of full power over its movements.” See you soon, K.

 

Elisa Pulido and Sholeh Wolpe at Casa Romantica

Elisa Pulido and Sholeh Wolpe are reading, tonight, July 30, 7pm, at the Casa Romantica Cultural Center & Gardens in San Clemente. This event, free and open to the public, is part of the Casa Romantica Reading Series, which features readings by poets and prose writers on the last Wednesday of every month.

 

vicki forman’s blog

Please take a look at Vicki Forman’s blog.

 

port photos

Some pictures of the Port Theater renovation are here via the OC Register.

 

casa romantica reading series - poetry.la interview

My friends who started the Casa Romantica Reading Series were interviewed in April for Poetry.LA, and the interview is here.

 

radio: latiolais on bibliocracy

Michelle Latiolais is a guest on Andrew Tonkovich’s show, Bibliocracy, today at noon on KPFK, and will be talking about her new novel, A Proper Knowledge. Michelle Latiolais is Associate Professor at UC Irvine and co-director of its Programs in Writing, the graduate fiction workshop which has produced so many excellent writers including herself. She is author of many short stories, published most recently in Western Humanities Review and Green Mountains Review, as well as a novel, Even Now, which won the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California.

 

port theater

I drove up PCH this morning, and the Port was being fenced and renovation had begun. It’s been closed for ten years, and I’d gotten used to seeing it boarded up. The theater opened in 1950 - single screen with an upper level.

 

mary

photo by Ed Chang

 

“shall we avoid them as unlucky places?”

One day in 2001, I went to my Aunt Mary’s house to show her what I’d collected from months of researching her family, its immediate and distant history. We went from lists and dates to stories that had no connection to scraps I’d brought. We looked together at the death-certificate for her uncle, Joe Rositani, and marveled that he’d only been forty when he died. I told her I’d grown up thinking he died an older man. It was a tragedy, I said, how he died on the highway - in the middle of the night – into the morning and waiting to be found.

She said the car’s driver had been drinking. We talked about how Joe had never learned to drive. Oh, but he could drink, Mary added. I was twenty-five, she said. I tried to think what twenty-five meant. She’d been married six years and had two small kids. She’d just bought a house in Buena Park in a new tract where the fog came in so thick she could hear but not see the cows that had broken free across Knott Avenue and wandered toward the tract.

Just before the funeral - that part - that was hard. Then she remembered her own mother and grandmother – Joe’s older sister and his mother. Walking in the Church was the worst. She faced the two women who both collapsed with a refusal to go inside. Fallen there, they must have felt that the Church doors had a truth that, with their own weight, they could not bear. One of them falls and then there goes the other one to the ground. I took one by the arm and pulled her up to her feet. I bent down and grabbed the other and stood her up, too. Locked arms, with me between, we walked in that Church. She told this story in her kitchen and my Aunt Mary walked, her arms bent as if she were walking two women-ghosts up a church-aisle. She walked toward me like she bore the weight again. I don’t know if it happened just this way, but this was how she told that story: how a car crash and death transformed her into something superhuman.

Later that afternoon, she showed me some of her collections. There, a drawer full of cigarette cases, each old, some beaded. And there, another drawer filled with compacts, snapped shut with mirrors. We didn’t have to open them.

 

cracked glass ceiling and sentences

This morning, not long after I’d heard Hillary Clinton’s speech, I also heard what sounded like some angry noise outside and coming from the alley. Out the window, I saw that a collection of neighbors from both sides of the street was standing around an upholstery van that seemed parked in a bad spot, between two apartment buildings and possibly blocking a driveway. I figured, though, that someone must have needed to park there for a job. But the neighborhood-crew that circled the van was not having it. And then I watched something amazing; I’d say it was a perverse version of watching that women really can do anything. Within minutes, after complaining about people parking in the alley and what if I did have to go somewhere (even if they didn’t), they spotted stuff — a phone, I think — in the worker’s van and keys he’d left in the vehicle. And then, vigilante-style, they nominated one of the group to move the car. Mind you, the car wasn’t theirs, but, sensing the eighteen million cracks and feeling they really could do anything, they crashed through that glass ceiling and drove some poor guy’s truck up the street.

I felt like moving to another state. But then I had Mexican food at five with a poet-friend, who reminded me of poems. We talked about Lyn Hejinian’s My Life: We had been in France where every word really was a bird, a thing singing. And then I forgot about the neighbors. My friend asked if I wanted to go along to an end of year reading for some writers; he said they were dressing up for the occasion as if they were going to a 1980’s prom. I told him I’d have to skip it; I’ve been to an eighties prom. For real.

 

mccain and poet laureates/ “i am the last…”

John McCain and poetry. And here’s one by Simic he might like.

 

mfa poets from cal state long beach, a reading

The MFA students from Cal State Long Beach will be reading their poems at Casa Romantica Cultural Center and Gardens in San Clemente on Wednesday, June 11, at 7:00pm. This reading is a special one to highlight some local MFAs. The featured readers include: Kathryn Frederich, Rhea Lewitski, Elizabeth Nicolello, Nora Simoes, Shannon Phillips. If you’ve never been to the Casa, try to make it; this is a great chance to support some poets who are also students. And it’s a good time of the year to see the Casa in daylight. See the series website for more info on each reader.

 

poems, frost, punishment

Poetry as punishment.

 

2007-2008 uci mfa reading series - last event of the year

If the BEA is too far north this weekend, the MFA students from UCI’s Programs in Writing will be having, on Sunday, their final reading for this season’s 2007-2008 UCI MFA Reading Series. The reading takes place at the Portfolio Coffeehouse in Long Beach on June 1 at 6pm. Featured readers include: Rick Sims, Emily Quinlan, Leah Green, and Ben Miller.