Field Recordings

Shameless post Christmas Plug for my YA retelling of the Odyssey...for Nook and Kindle

2011-12-27T13:44:00.001-08:00

If you are a fan of YA adventure fiction, or general fiction, check out Seven Days on the Mountain, a post apocalyptic action adventure that retells the trials of Odysseus set against the backdrop of a ruined

America.

seven_daysnewnew.pdf Download this file

Nooksters: Seven Days..., a "Don't Miss" YA novel, now available for the Nook

2011-11-29T16:44:00.001-08:00

Lyrical Reviews is spotlighting Seven Days on the Mountain (available for your NOOK and KINDLE) for November. A "Don't Miss" YA book which "is an examination of humanity the likes of which has endured in literature since the dawn of story-telling."

Seven Days is a retelling of the Odyssey with a teenage female protagonist. Sure to delight and entertain readers of all ages.

Hey, for $2.99 how can you go wrong?

Seven Days..., a "Don't Miss" YA novel, featured on Lyrical Reviews

2011-11-05T09:33:00.001-07:00

Lyrical Reviews is spotlighting Seven Days on the Mountain (available for your Kindle) for November. A "Don't Miss" YA book which "is an examination of humanity the likes of which has endured in literature since the dawn of story-telling."

Hey, for $2.99 how can you go wrong?

News From the Front, a new e-chapbook, is now available on the Dead Mule...

2011-10-17T17:53:00.001-07:00

Sometimes poems come to me like guilty Saturday matinees, movies you would never watch unless you were home sick with the flu; chicken & stars steaming on the side table beside you, your mother on the phone in the other room. Your head is enlarged and the sunlight falls greasy and pointed upon the yellow wallpaper of the television room.

This October, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature published my new electronic chapbook of poetry, News From the Front, a collection of war themed poetry. Many of the poems have discovered life elsewhere: The Delaware Poetry Review, Anderbo, Xanadu, & Winning Writers: War Poetry.

Please enjoy.

Seven Days from the Mountain, a young adult adventure & retelling of the Odyssey, is available for the Kindle and will be featured in a Young Adult Publishing Blog in November.

About Seven Days on the Mountain

"The action in Whitaker's prose flows crisply, and was exciting to the point where I would want to turn the page before I was done reading."-- Nate McFadden

Untitled

2011-09-04T16:12:00.001-07:00

Check out my new review of Heather Aimee O' Neill

The_Broadkill_Review_Vol_5_No_4.pdf Download this file

's Memory Future in the new Broadkill Review.

Falling Skies: You're no Battlestar Galactica

2011-08-01T12:52:00.000-07:00

I gave Falling Skies a chance. I like my sci-fi dark.

I like my characters to undergo a personal transformation by fire, and come out on the other side. Some make it. Some don't.

Noah Wylie (see second pic) is a great lead, a father, history teacher, who is the narrator by proxy; it is through his eyes and heart that we experience the alien invasion. And these aliens are bad-ass, and they have mech soldiers to rip flesh into ashes, and they take control of children via Alien-meets-Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and through the horrible experience the creators make sometimes profound and sometimes mundane observations & reflections about the nature of man, the nature of democracy, the nature of war, and parenthood.

It is good TV.

However the more I watched it the more I just wanted to start watching Battlestar Galactica all over again. BSG won a Peabody Award, for excellence, and reflected post 9-11 culture, from the suicide bombers perspective, the perspective of the oppressed. Now Falling Skies succeeds in this as well--putting the good guys in perilous moral predicaments, however BSG's aesthetic trumps Falling Skies dated paradigm of the resistance. A proto-alpha male backbone, FS's heroes feel dated. Forced. Perhaps overwritten. AMC's Walking Dead hobo survivors are like BSG's characters, rooted in personal drama and complex, and while I was watching FS I kept waiting for TWD's survivors to show up and take care of business.

BSG put a female teacher as the leader of the dwindling human population and played up the personal defects of Commander Adama and his children: Lee, his "adopted" Kara, and his crew. There are so many strong female leads in the show it would be tedious to list them all; the characters are put through the emotional ringer, especially Kara and President Rosalin who are equally headstrong and often arrogant and suffer hubris.

And back to the aliens...FS aliens are two faced, a mech soldier and the alien ugly creatures.BSG also featurs two faced aliens, the mech cyborg cylons--who appear in a variety of forms, and the human models, the AIs that become more and more human as the show progresses. The humanity shown by the Cylons challenge the typical good vs. evil dichotomy. They are humanized. The human Cylon models undergo a spiritual transformation, worshiping one god, vs the humans worship of many gods: a smash up of Norse/Greek/Roman mythologies, which make for an interesting sub-plot in the dystopian drama.

So much of the Cylon threat is psychological for Gaius Baltar, the show's genius anti-hero Lothario, who falls in love with sexy Six that exists entirely in his head and heart (see top pic).

BSG's scope lead them to explore prison relations and consensual slavery, religious freedom and religious fanaticism, union strikes, racial tension, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now BSG did have five seasons to develop a rich and profound, not mention visually stunning, oeuvre. But FS just seems a little, produced, canned, forced. Part of the problem is that the scope is derivative, borrowing tropes from a variety of sources.

But it is their first season.

The mini-series that begins BSG is great, and sets the misc-en-scene, it's not nearly as tense as the first episode of season one proper, "33", where the Cylons psychologically screw with the humans; tracking them through hyper space and attacking them every 33 minutes, the news leaks that the Cylons look like humans now, which prompts the last scraps of humanity to turn on each other, a theme that continues throughout the show.

FS, if given the legs might get a chance to grow some wings and fly. Many sci-fi series start off a bit weak: The X-files and Buffy come to mind (monster of the week and the Master paled to later story lines)

Give them a season to get their legs underneath them and the quality might improve.

Thanks for your support! Seven Days on the Mountain available for other devices

2011-07-04T06:33:00.001-07:00

Seven Days on the Mountain is available for your Kindle, but for those who are without the Kindle, you may use your i phone, i pad, or i pod touch. Needless to say the Kindle reader works in/on a variety of platforms including PCs, Macs, Androids, Blackberry's, etc You may have to purchase or download a reader for your device, or you may have one pre-loaded onto your device of choice.

Currently working on making the YA adventure available for other platforms.

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Seven Days…is based on Homer’s The Odyssey, except Odysseus is Callie Grady, a clever teen girl who uses her wits and skill to survive in an America ripped apart by a new civil war.

In the midst of the turmoil, the blood, the death, Callie learns to trust herself, learns to survive, and most importantly learns to love. It’s a novel that combines elements of action-adventure, family drama, and the supernatural into a fast paced adventure. While geared towards the teen set, adults will find much in the novel to admire and enjoy, much like Gregory Galloway’s As Simple as Snow, John Green’s Looking for Alaska, or Gary Paulsen’s adventure novels such as Hatchet.

$2.99 here.

Watch out for the cyclops: the Odyssey re-imagined for Young Adults by S Scott Whitaker

2011-06-28T17:00:00.001-07:00

Seven Days on the Mountain, avialble on Amazon, Thursday, June 30th, is based on Homer’s The Odyssey. S Scott Whitaker's young adult action thriller is centered around Callie Grady, a clever teen girl who uses her wits and skill to survive in an America ripped apart by a new civil war, an uncertain dystopian future.

In the midst of the turmoil, the blood, the death, Callie learns to trust herself, learns to survive, and most importantly learns to love. It’s a novel that combines elements of action-adventure, family drama, and the supernatural into a fast paced adventure. While geared towards the teen set, adults will find much in the novel to admire and enjoy, much like Gregory Galloway’s As Simple as Snow, Nel Shusterman's Unzipped, or Gary Paulsen’s adventure novels such as Hatchet.

From the author's forward:

"As a young man I was drawn to films such as The Road Warrior, Blade Runner, Red Dawn, and other dystopian stories. There is something interesting about a world that's in ruins. In many ways books like The Road, The Stand, films like The Book of Eli, I Am Legend, Children of Men (and it's novel counterpart), etc. are our modern westerns, pitting a desperate everyman, or in this case everywoman, against a hostile environment, for loved ones, for good, for what's right.

The pacing is quick, the action often violent, but not overly so. There is much adults will enjoy in this read, but the intended audience is young teens. As for The Odyssey, the major conflicts Odysseus has to overcome have been re-imagined. The gods appear in the form of a giant Indian, and though much of the novel is realistic, there is a magical realism, or supernatural backbone; a world where a girl could worry about a boy and battle evil spirits, greedy mauraders, an old crone who lives in a supernatural orchard, an insane bear, and others, all while navigating a winter storm."

Links to reviews

2011-05-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

My review of Delmarva writers...
Harold Wilson's The Night Blooming Cereus & Other Stories

and

my review of Fleda Brown's Driving With Dvorak

Ivan's first stage appearance with The Sunshine State Band

2011-05-15T02:10:00.000-07:00

Ivan joined the Flynn's last night on stage at the Great Machipongo Clam Shack on "Stepping Stone," assisting Forest on shakers. Little scamp kept beaming his shy grin at the audience.

The Writer's Studio Reading Series/ Sunshine State Band

2011-05-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

Featuring Ruth Bizot, Betty Davis, Diana Sullivan and Tracy Rice Weber.

Sat Night, 5/14, 7PM historic Cokesbury Church on the corner of Market and West Streets in Onancock, VA.

Poetry and Prose folks. Poetry and Prose. Do not know these writers personally, but saw them read at the April Favorite Poem Reading, and if their work is anything like their influences, you're in for treat.

Bizot is a journalist and a poet, Davis is a retired police officer and into Rumi, Rilke, and Stein (a law firm...mwah), Sullivan studied dance and photography and writes "New York" vignettes and stories, and Weber is teacher and poet.

Also poet Terry Flynn and spiritualist Jeanne Flynn will be performing words and music at the Great Machipongo Clam Shack in Nassawadox from 6:30 on... Lots of culture out there...see you on the other side.

Elegies

2011-04-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

A link to Larry Levis reading Caravaggio: Swirl and Vortex

Larry Levis Documentary Trailer

2011-04-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

Happy national Poetry Month!

The end of public education as we know it? Or the end of cutting edge America?

2011-02-24T05:10:00.000-08:00

Much has been said of the union protests that have spread from Wisconsin to Ohio and to Providence, RI. States and counties are under the gun to cut programs, which means that educators and the arts are some of the first programs to see the gleaming knife slice through the sodium light of the state house.

Typically Democratic presidents are good for the arts, and for education, but because the recession is limping into the black both areas are targeted for deep cuts.

Consider Detroit, who will close half of its schools, and force 60 kids into a classroom. Now I don't know about you, but 60 is a helluva lot to teach at one time. I'd have to refigure how I taught essays to even meet the needs of 60 kids per class. As for other activities? It'd have to be worksheets and scan-trons....ugh...which I loathe as a intellectual pursuit. I find them best used as classroom management tools, not as assessments of student thinking and progress.

San Diego is cutting public art grants. So are other cities and states. In Maryland, where Arts Immersion programs are used to boost test scores and student involvement in academics (a program that works, btw), is facing a cut. The program needs just over 1 million dollars to reach every child in the state, and yet it's neck is on the chopping block, which is riciculous when you consider that Maryland schools rank #1 nationally. Why shoot yourself in the proverbial foot?

Raise a generation of smart, innovative, creative minds.

According to data gathered by Lake Polls, 89% of Americans noted that Arts and Education are the two most important areas in the country's budget, necessary to bring America back to the cutting edge of the future and believe that "the arts are critical to prepare students to be competitive in the 21st century economy, which is increasingly reliant on an innovative, adaptable workforce with strong communication skills and high self-motivation."

So why, tea party members, why replublican leaders, why moderate democrats, why? Why do we continue to shoot ourselves in the foot?

What's happening in modern poetry

2011-02-19T07:50:00.000-08:00

I wish to say I was more versed (pun intended) in the vast underbelly of independent poetry happening throughout the western world, but the fact is the sheer weight of those serving the poetic muse is deep as it is broad. And I have to small boys, and they take precedence over poetry. However, over the last week I have the pleasure of reading Glenn Sheldon (allegory smashed up with surrealistic language), Nick Martlatt (trippy long lines and short zen koans with a dark edge), among others, and what I find I generally enjoy. I admit I don't get some of it. Sheldon's Biogrpahy o the Boy who prayed to the god of foreheads perplexed me for most of the read, while Martlatt's How We Fall Apart lulled me times until he picked up the axe again.

I'm not really sure what my point is here, only to say I am encouraged by the depth of those who follow the poetic.

And poetry seems to me, a great medium for the internet age, where we take our reads and news in short form, rather than long form.

Twitter makes us more economical, Tumblr bends the blogger toward image, and Facebook allows us to be long-winded or brief.

Maybe the written word isn't so dead.

New work up on Anderbo Magazine Website

2011-02-14T09:01:00.001-08:00

One of my WWII poems, from the ever-evolving Sleepr Agnt manuscript is up at Anderbo, one of the best web magazines in the country.

Thrift Store X-mas

2010-12-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

Thrift Store X-mas Deux

For the second year in a row Michele and I are celebrating Thrift Store X-mas. Which means the following: we spend $50 +/- bucks on each other via a secondary/used/on-line used store, etc. A freeing experience. There's no expectations. Pressure? Sure. Especially if you devote any cranial mass to picking out gifts, but it's fun, addictive, and just common sense.

Last year I got a pickling jar, a wooden log carrier, books, tapes (for my truck, whose sound system is so 1993), small gifts my wife selected because we shared a joke about them once, or because it was, well, unexpected. Like a English hound iron door stop, painted with realistic, yet semi ironic colors.

For the kids, well it's a mixed bag....The dollars we save goes towards their gifts. And we're not super present givers anyway. One big gift from us, wrapped-- a happiness bomb under the tree, the others laid out by Santa.

We set a precedent for Santa to not leave so much. This year a few Lord of the Rings Action Figures, a few small lego kits (minifigure heavy), and archery stuff (new arrows) for Thor. For Ivy...a mirror gift of numbering... Star Wars, Toy Story (he's a junkie) legos. KISS. Keep it simple stupid.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I remember being spoiled at X-mas. Not that that's a bad thing, either. A field of toys and books.

My kids are spoiled:Uncles, grandparents, and kin spoil my kids plenty (Uncle Eric is freaking Santa Claus, and the gp's are constantly on toy/clothing/gadget alert for the viking brothers, so they're not experiencing toy poverty or anything, just thought that I'd make that clear, if anyone was wondering). Regardless, the whole experience is more or less stress free and pro fun I'd thought I'd share...

Summer Poetry Reading in Rehoboth

2010-07-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

If anyone's interested in a mid-summer run to Rehoboth's outlet malls, consider Tuesday, July 27th, and stop by the Rehoboth Beach Library for the summer poetry series. Besides moi, Denise Clemmons, poet and food critic for the Cape Gazette, and Sherry Chapplle, poet and professor.

Excellent company. Books will be for sale afterwards.

It's a quality series, and full of surprises. Garry Hanna has done a bang-up job organizing the summer series.

Bring a few quarters to ward off the meter maid. Reading starts at 7:00 PM.

Love it when I find one of my old works on the web.

2010-07-14T18:02:00.001-07:00

Neon, formally Four Volts, has one of my early short stories in their archives. A very solid mag in the UK for the upcoming and established.

"The Hairy Wall" is about a young girl whose hair is forcibly cut from her head.

Cloudy with a chance

2010-06-05T18:45:00.000-07:00

So the homemade brew is bottled, batch one, at least, and the taste is complex: light, highlights of lemon, and hops. The color: cloudy.

Not that cloudy beer is the worst thing in the world. Usually a long settling time plus some refrigerator time should correct most of the cloudiness. Always a risk when adding new ingredients. Should mellow to a very tasty summer lager.

The beer is the first of the summer projects. Manuscripts, gym, office, manuscripts, office, blogging, gym rounds out the rest of the summer daily activities.

new links to older work

2010-05-28T19:57:00.001-07:00

An experimental poem, partially inspired by a day in Munich with playwright Cartland Berge, and opera singer Josh Dooley.

Delaware Poetry Review
link to lit mag.

A blurb from my review of Fleda Brown's memoir Driving with Dvorak from Amazon.com

As always, thanks for the support.

One of those moments

2010-05-21T20:38:00.000-07:00

The great thing about being a fine arts teacher is witnessing students challenge themselves to create. Over the last two weeks I've observed my drama students struggle, start, stop, obsess over,and stress over the ten minute film due at the end of the semester.

The rules of the game:

Ten minutes
Must be based around a lyric from a song

The assignment was layered so students could explore basic film conventions either through viewing movies, writing storyboards, etc. Basically a menu of choices the students could do, or not do, for points.

Even if the students fail miserably, they learn via the creative process. Students who took the class more than once kept referring back to previous successes and failures, and without ever having to lecture or direct, the class, as a whole, reflected and learned from past mistakes.

The scout their locations, think about costumes and props, rip off the greats, and follow a process to its logical conclusion.

Yay movies.

Perhaps it's the artist-sadist in me, but it was glorious to watch them care about a project that allowed them to express themselves.

What have they produced?

a short about God and the Devil hosting a late night radio show

a Dear John tear jerker complete with funeral etc.

a pseudo-auto-biographical doc about the challenges of choosing schools:

a trippy psycho exploration of identity:

Poetry at the Beach

2010-05-16T07:38:00.000-07:00

I'll be one of several regional poets reading in Delmarva for the summer. Come and check us out.

Tuesday, April 20 - Rehoboth Library: Michael Blaine, Beth Joselow, H.A. Maxson

Thursday, May 27 - South Coastal Library: Sherry Chappelle, H.A. Maxson, Scott Whitaker

Tuesday, June 22 - Lewes Library: Sherry Chappelle, Denise Clemons, Beth Joselow

Tuesday, July 27 - Rehoboth Library: Sherry Chappelle, Denise Clemons, Scott Whitaker

Thursday, Aug.26 - South Coastal Library: Micahel Blaine, Denise Clemons, Beth Joselow

Tuesday, Sept. 28 - Lewes Library: Michael Blaine, H.A. Maxson, Scott Whitaker

A nicely done pop culture personality test...Myers Briggs Style

2010-05-07T15:29:00.000-07:00

Click to see my Star Wars Personality!!

Radio Spot "Conversations Live with Cyrus Webb"

2010-04-18T16:59:00.000-07:00

Tune in, itune, or play the interview at your own leisure. Cyrus interviews me about 35 minutes into the program. Re: two poems in A Dream in the Clouds: Poems celebrating Obama's election

rock and roll ain't noise pollution: Shore Made Music Festival in Belle Haven, VA

2009-09-26T06:03:00.000-07:00

(Carnage 45, aka Shawn Dix, will perform at Shore Made)

Shore peeps

Shore Made Music Festival.

Today. @11:30-10:00

Rock, psychedelic folk, rap, alternative.

Five dollars to see me holla.

Poets: Terry Flynn, PoetCynn & Scott Whitaker slice rhymes and lines.

Beatlesque

2009-09-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

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I’ve neglected this blog.

Mostly because I started it to see if I could handle weekly deadlines for the Delmarva Quarterly, which is still in the process of developing the magazine beyond the borders of the page…and originally it was to be about arts in the rural areas, but I have neglected that focus as well.

Whatever, right? It’s just a blog

Today a list…

The almost top ten Beatlesque records that the Beatles didn’t record.

Yup. Sacrilege? Perhaps. My misspent youth found me as a record store clerk and music junkie. Not quite a snob, I don’t think. Not like Jack Black in High Fidelity, for the adults I looked up to had broad deep tastes in music, a textual understanding of great pop music vs. the “my indie band is better than yr indie band attitude” one often ran up against in aisles of the record store. If I was fortunate to work a shift with them the conversation and music enlarged my understanding of music and great songwriting, often the term Beatlesque was thrown around. Not that they invented it or anything, far from it, but the concept was invented for me.

Anyways enough yapping. These almost ten records/songs are pop gems. Beatlesque. Fun. Dark. Full of heart

1. Woodface—Crowded House—this masterpiece is poppy, dark, and perfect
2. Squeeze—ArgyBargy—Really, anyone of their records…I like the title
3. Jellyfish—Jellyfish---sleeper choice…a super cool psychedelic pop gem, forgotten by most
4. The Lemonheads—It’s a Shame About Ray—edgy, poppy, and addled with drug abuse and sweet love songs
5. Extraordinary Machine—Fiona Apple—this single’s orchestrated musical-like composition recalls the best of the “Broadway” McCartney compositions
6. What’s the story Morning Glory?—Oasis—uh, duh. Not as original, lyrically as any of the others on the list, but sonically great
7. Raspberry Beret—Prince—ah the Purple one
8. Boys Don’t Cry—The Cure—you can’t tell me this isn’t pure sugar, mid-era Beatles rock rehash—in a good way
9. I’m spent…my wee brain is hurting.

You get the idea folks, of course is better than the Beatles, but I’m sure you have your own idea of what else could be added to this list…

Infinite Jest! That's entertainment! Infinite Summer begins today!

2009-06-21T10:03:00.001-07:00

That’s entertainment: Infinite Summer begins today!

This blog was started almost a year ago to train my brain to regularly post for Delmarva Quarterly, an arts & humanities magazine (that’s going glossy) for which I freelance regularly for, and though DMQ hasn’t started the blog sites yet, still in the works, and I’m cool with that, though I feel posting anxiety for not regularly updating this blog as I promised.

So to posting I go…on Father’s Day, between playing the dragon game with Thor and making cheese sandwiches….

For those uninitiated who have not tested David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The challenge begins today, and so far there are an impressive number of creative projects occurring as readers tackle the challenge. There are some famous readers, including the Decemberists Colin Meloy, and others. Some readers are making FLICKR boards, plus the usual discussion boards and other literary discussion detritus.

I’ve read IJ twice, and more than any other book, the images and words are slam fixed in my brain. It’s gothic, it’s funny, it’s challenging, it’s satirical, it’s wonderful, it’s grotesque. And the work itself is a testament to the American Imagination. Where else can pot smokers, alcoholics, socio-paths, independent film, pro sports, wheelchair assassins, drug rehab counselors, drug addicted transvestites, child prodigies, and entertainment so good it will kill you, come together to marvel, question, and enlighten. It is entertainment.

You can visit the site here.

Rash

2009-06-17T10:56:00.000-07:00

Rash shows that tagging and graffiti can be elevated to political and subversive expression.

If you like subverting the mainstream, and fucking with convention, you'll enjoy this documentary where the graff artists challenge political and social norms. Worth the look. It's airing on the Documentary channel (dish network) this month.

Poetry at 140 characters or less

2009-05-11T17:34:00.000-07:00

Twitter, the new social networking app (new, only in relative terms) offers users a chance to communicate what's on their minds in 140 characters or less.

Interestingly enough there are quite a few poetry tweets, or tweeters.

Haiku for the modern age, poetweets are becoming quite the rage. It's a challenge and it's fun.

You can follow mine here.

Some of the best I've seen are...

http://twitter.com/baracku

http://twitter.com/semaphore

http://twitter.com/PoetryTweets

http://twitter.com/poetryireland

http://twitter.com/anonpoetry

of course it's all a work in progress.

National Poetry Month: 4 days worth of Poem-A-Day challenge

2009-04-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

My participation in the Poetic Asides Poem A Day Challenge has been fun, but for the most part I feel somewhat uninspired. I must correct. Still engagement with words is uplifting. April is a busy month with T-ball, AP exams, school play, reviewing for the Delmarva Qrtly...

prompt 12: complete the line: So we decided
I like these prompts, and stuck with the first thing that came to me wee head this morning--early--8:00ish (normally I post late at night)

Untitled

So we decided to keep fucking and ignore the storm
With the windows crying like hurt flappers
As the wind blew the curtains back like lashes
As drops peppered our hot skin. And fresh spring
Rolled out on the ends of your nipples
And hung on the ends of your hair
So that it felt, and so it became,
that you were the ringing cloth twisted
into the hot mouth of a starving man,
the water speeding his lips and mouth,
his body clenching and thrusting to consume
what it needs most, your skin, your taste, your water.

Prompt 11: object poems

Attic Clutter

Their love can be counted in their attic discards,
the boxes and boxes, and cartons of mothy clothes,
receipts rolled and rubberbanded
old lamps that lay like sleeping birds against the chimney stone,
toys and puzzles in bags, the crates of Christmas pasts,
seasonal bags of orange, green, and pink decorations
that gang up on the attic landing, eager orphans
srowding the door. Oh their love is cluttered
as the attic, as the garage, the basement, the closets,
so full a collapse is imminent,
so many are the tokens of their affections.

Prompt 10: poem about Friday...yes a dull prompt, but alas I feel not up to the task...of being inventive

Friday Night Traveling

Friday clips along,
and with the wind blowing striated clouds by my window,
it feels like you’re on a ship

and ahead where the water wheels end
there’ll be rum and dancing,
smoke curling out of long pipes

like weary beer faces
hanging in a beer garden in Munich.
Of this I can promise you, ropes will run up,

somebody’s lacing up for a voyage tonight,
and whether the vessel is a bottle,
ship, or dress, the old heart and head

will fill with galleons, and coins.
All the rope in the world couldn’t hold you back
especially with the moon high, the air fat and warm.

Prompt 9:Memory poem. This isn't a memory per say, but a memory of a reoccuring dream. Something I've written about before.

It is a small matter

Sitting on the down edge of a see-saw
my flats in the long cool grass,
how the skin prickles and bristles when the grass
brushes across,

the summer dress crumpled around my thighs.

There is a voice on the air, my mother, and the radio
and the smoke from my father’s pipe curling, curling, curling

then comes rumble

and water,
the sluicing slate of earth and tide

hours later would I awake in the arms of my father.

I thought I was on the beach,

but I was on a roof, the world a white noise
of water, water, water.

PAD challenge seven

2009-04-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

For those not keeping score (do I blame you for not?...No.) I'm participating in a poem a day composition challenge (for no prize other than the experience) in celebration of National Poetry Month.

It's cool, and forced, and fun, and I'm jazzing on the vibe of just playing with words. Which is the art of verse and prose.

So tonight's challenge was to write a poem about a routine. I name dropped the Beatle's Doctor Roberts and spun up a lyrical night of work.

DOC ROBERTS FRIDAY NIGHT SHIFT

With the moony latch unlocked
the handle of my bags find my softened sick hand.
Oh the medicine, the pills, the pie,
the bandages that must be wrapped,
dressed and perfumed;
to fix the broken bones, the shattered vessels
of the heart.

One must always wrap tight and true
and nightly cover wounds,
which in some cases
is whole body and brain
and like a mummy the patients wander
back and forth to the bathroom, to the fridge,
in various states of dress.

And under the clock I must rush
and going to and fro,
to cot, bed and bench,
for the broken-hearted must be tended.

PAD seven

2009-04-07T18:04:00.000-07:00

While undertaking this challenge I've enjoyed sound play, and frankly, I've enjoyed not trying to hard to finish the poem. Liken it to mining. Stream of consciousness, etc. It's calming. The prompt was to write a dirty or clean poem (in all of it's permutations)

Getting dirty building a treehouse

Oil and grease, gaps in the gunk where pink shows
right on up to the sun, and the aluminum glint
across the skin where the screws shaved and were gutted
as the drill pounded and roared. The skin glitters
with aluminum sparks. There are ticks tucked behind ears
and knees so long did we crawl and swing the wood
to build the frame and straighten the structure.
A tree house raised into the air, into the blossoms
How it will transform and enlarge the play
of the children it will house, bite and rest.

PAD Challenge six

2009-04-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

Today's challenge was to write a poem about something missing...So I whipped up some lyric phoenix image thang, witha dash of Stevens thrown in for measure. I do like the longer lines here. It needs a tad more flesh before being completed, but I think this is skeleton poem. As for today's prompt, I like the theme, and it's broad enough (like them all) for mucho lee-way.

Missing My New Life in Seattle

To identify what is missing it is better to identify what is not:

Brain, humor, nerves, neural networks, lungs.

Give me eyes, bone, and breast, and let heave my breath
into new flesh, and ash will fill my mouth
and orphans will bring me new names, wrapped
in butcher paper. Give me hair, and clothes, and leave
me in a small town, in the middle of another coast.

From there I will report. From there the truth will be told

PAD Challenge five

2009-04-05T18:11:00.000-07:00

The prompt for today was Landmark--real, small, imaginary.

I chose Warhol's factory as a cultural/art landmark. Some of this I like and no doubt will return to edit the later bits. Tighten up the form, if I can, etc.

The Factory

How the films unspool and unspool
and fall like wet spaghetti at his feet,
his dainty feet…like they crawled off some Christmas elf
and got stranded on his stumps.

And Candy’s eats the air like a heavy hail coming ‘cross a field
and Joe and Holly and Jackie
crunch pills and silver pies
and everyone waits for a fat silence to spread,

but there is only gossip and pick-up lines
and endless soapy singing,
and thick branches of smoke,
and so many promises

and too many people loving all alone.
Soon the sun will swallow everyone up.
Where did the girls go? Where is the phone?
And who will clean all of this up?

And the parties end like they begin:
phone in the hand of a mirror man,
hot cigarettes on the lips of beautiful,
like wicks on rail yard dynamite sticks.

Dead Mule, me, oh my

2009-04-04T21:20:00.001-07:00

http://www.deadmule.com/poetry/2009/04/s-scott-whitaker-%e2%80%93-three-poems/

PAD challenge four

2009-04-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

Day four into Poem a day challenge: I enjoyed the last time I participated in the PAD challenge, and just enjoyed playing around. I'm feeling that less this time around. Perhaps it's just work is tre busy and I'm generally exhausted.

This prompt is another 101 workshop prompt. Broad and general. And RLB's got a hard task to come up with 31 prompts and make it accessible. This was one hard for me cause I was feeling the topic.... but being Saturday, at least I didn't have to write a sonnet, or sestina. So far the experience has been kinda like watching a brainless, but entertaining, reality show.

FOX IN THE HEDGE

She comes every night when the warm air
bakes against the house, and she snatches scraps
from the neighbor’s slop dish, her musk
edges the cat under the porch,
the dogs bark and squeak, bark and squeal.

In lamplight her fur ages nightly
and like a movie star she is silver,
she is orange. Her head cocked
with a dash of drama, her tail
sprung for surprise. The children name her

nightly, it is sport, the discovery of her trot
her mischief, her eyes.

PAD three

2009-04-03T18:28:00.000-07:00

This prompt didn't thrill me. A CW class exercise of the most basic order, but still, it's general enough to bend it to your will.

One was to take the phrase The problem with and fill in the blank. I fiddled around with syllabics, but eventually allowed my ear to take over and gave up on formality. Again not great, but it satisfies the exercise and gives me fodder for future days

The problem with flesh

The problem with flesh
is that it doesn’t turn
into what you want:
lean frame, muscle,

new marrow, head of hair.
The problem with flesh
is that it’s water,
and like a dirty fishtank

becomes a kind of theatre
for those who observe
as we flitter and flake
about stones and kelp.

The problem with flesh
is it must be fed and walked.
And left up to its own devices
burns like a fast wick on summer days.

PAD two

2009-04-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

Outsider poem

BOY. PARENT’S ROOM. FIRST EXPLORATION. 1971

Light from the window is the color of linen
and the satin underthings hang like earings upon the dresser.
Atomizer, ribblet, shoehorn,
gossamer scarf, and rings, rings, rings.

The wineglass moons upon the stain, and the wineglass itself
like a masticated spider turned up in the dust.
Where is father? There is no sign, his dresser as bare as a button,
shoes tucked like so many dead men under the bed.

The books have been replaced with magazines
curled up at the ends like smoke.
And her ashtray is stale, and printed from her thumb
smeared with make-up, powder, blush, blush, and blush.

It is still

The air dull, almost as if it were an instrument
that had not been tuned for years.
He dares not open the closet, for fear
of moth spider wing and bat, and instead runs his fingers

across her pearls, her stones, her bracelet
made of bone. He is sniffing the wineglass
when downstairs someone stirs a knocking
and backwards returns, only later
at dinner is he aware of secret moments,

pounding bed, crumpled tissues, silence.

note: I like much of this...and the tone...definetly one to revist.

PAD challenge one

2009-04-02T17:53:00.000-07:00

Prompt: an origins poem.
My inspiration: my first T-ball practice

Cocoons, T-Ball, March spring

Weeds rise out of the skull of a batting helmet,
and the old farmer agrees again to take the mound
of his rusty tractor to sweep the field of purple clover.
Above the gummed and besticked benches
wasps crawl and neck, their eyes as slick
as new baseball bats, their wings as hairy
as a scrape. The cocoon rots off dusty wings
in the hollow reaches of the stands
that bow like a broken bough, that both beam
and hoard darkness, damp, and darkness.

note: I got tired at the end...it was freaking 10 pmish and Lost was on...
I do like the gothy rotting vibe...

Poem a Day

2009-04-02T17:38:00.000-07:00

Poetic Asides, a blog by Robert Lee Brewer, sponsors a poem a day challenge, open to anyone, to craft a poem a day based on a prompt.

I competed in one of his PAD challenges in the fall and enjoyed the mental exercise. Though much of what I wrote did not fit into my overall vision (of my current evolving manuscript) the exercises were helpful in another way entirely. It's important for artists to flex their muscles. I can understand the snide academic attitude many may feel about the quality of much of the entries, and the idea that writing a PAD might be beneath them, but the contest gets back to an essential cornerstone of writing: having fun with words.

And if that isn't why we write, then I'm a table lamp.

The format is easy, and there is a contest, though I believe no prizes are involved, and he's assembled many a fine judge.

So if you be not of the house of Montague come and crush a cup of wine.

Roper's Drum of War Rocks

2009-03-08T06:16:00.000-07:00

Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and his Brothers in the Civil War, by Robert Roper, Walker Books, $28.00

War opens with a barrage of blood and shells, as “false twilight” falls upon George Washington Whitman’s unit, “the scent of pennyroyals, crushed by soldier’s shoes remained intense,” as Walt’s younger brother navigates America’s critical junctures for identity and union: Antietam, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, and Vicksburg. And War remains aloft, backtracking through the family’s lean years as America saw artisan carpentry work replaced by faster, less disciplined construction as America began to engender itself as a nation of great cities, in particular New York, and we see New York growing as Whitman moved about its river run streets, New York of the busy working class, New York of the freewheeling prostitution days. War is very much about how young George, Jeff and Walt came to embody the restless, ambitious, and independent spirit of America. Robert Roper’s work is an instant classic, mixing poetic biography with well paced war reenactments with the Whitman family narratives of near-poverty, madness and Tuberculosis.

Much of the early book focuses on Walt’s years as an editor, journalist, writer, and man of the streets, prowling Manhattan for inspiration among the Opera Halls and streets teeming with sexuality and energy. Roper is even tempered with Walt’s appetites throughout; he speculates very little and sees no reason too. Roper allows Whitman to be himself, through Whitman’s own notebooks that catalogued men he met in the streets, or later in the hospital wards. Whitman’s sexuality is not ignored, and Roper offers other ways to interpret the data, showing that Walt was interested in people, in humanity, not always a sexual liaison, but liaisons nevertheless. Roper does check Whitman when it comes to what he got wrong about the Civil War, how his later work Drum Taps remains aloof, almost, as if Whitman could not gather the energy to make the horror he witnessed poetic or palpable. “The real war will never get into the books” the poet once said, and indeed Whitman’s frustrated interior monologue about his later writings are evident as Roper shows how Whitman kept putting it off the publication of Taps, adding to it after Lincoln’s assassination, even halting the printing of it after he’d prepared it for publication. “Drum Taps was a success largely because of lack of competition” offers Roper, who points out the dissonance between the written word of the manuscript and the enormity of the Civil War experience for the poet, and his family. He argues Whitman worked, suffered even, to bridge his encompassing vision, but his hesitancy in his letters and his business records show a Whitman striving for something more sublime than he had written. He reminds us that Whitman was a mythmaker, one whose powers failed to capture the enormity of being a solider on the battlefield, and how that failure haunted his later years.

The real war did get written down, not by poets or journalists, but by the soldiers themselves. This is where younger brother George steps in, a recorder of details and short prose that enlarged and informed Whitman’s writing. Often George’s letters were basis for Walt’s journalistic pieces; George keeping a journal and writing letters to his mother, Walt, and younger brother Jeff.

If the early part of Drum is about New York coming into its own, it is also about Washington genesis into a real city, for as Whitman hastens to nursemaid, fretting over his brother, Washington begins to blossom into the creature it is now; the once pastoral town becomes a town of men making deals, manned with armies of clerks, the papermill war machine fueled by bars, prostitutes and the spirit of national crises, its “carpe diem atmosphere.”

At times David McCollough, the voice of Ken Burn’s Civil War reaches out through Roper’s prose, but that’s not a bad thing, it is akin to poets summoning each other’s images and motifs and tones, as it is the occurrence is partly subjective, but this book reads like a gathering of historians continuing a dialogue, focused through the lens of the Whitman family, whom like many other families, wrote a furious pace.

At the center the epistle narrative is family, namely a mother, whose threadbare knuckle experiences gave her a sharp eye and callous hands. This is a woman, whom during the War was nursemaid to her retarded youngest son, Edward, as well as two other brothers, Andrew Jackson who died young after fathering children with an Irish whore, and Jesse whom went mad after a stint of sailing life. This is a woman who kept grandchildren fed, bills paid, with George’s salary. This is a woman who often played nursemaid for Jeff’s children, and watched out for his wife, whose back was prone to chronic pain. Now the Drum of War is a biography fueled by the words of three passionate men and their stalwart mother, who were hungry for news of each other; a modern family flung wide, connecting by post and infrequent visitations.

While Mrs. Whitman served as a touchstone for her children’s experiences, it was George whom all were anxious about. George who had an uncanny knack for living through the worst of the battles this country would ever see; once George’s coat was shredded by raining shells and bullets, though George was never touched, and at Fredericksburg George suffered a cheek wound while his company suffered death and dismemberment. George Washington Whitman made his rounds throughout the war and the Whitman family’s imagination followed at Antietam, The Wilderness, the crater, and the POW camps at Salisbury, NC, and Danville.

Now the Drum of War brings to light the fingerprints the family left upon the country, as younger brother Jeff designed waterworks and helped engineer the prototypes of America’s modern cities, while George’s experience as a seasoned office in the Civil War prepared him to become a successful developer, all on top of Walt’s pioneering verse, TB raising hell among all Americans trying to rise up.

Note: the short form of this review is currently available in the current Delmarva Quarterly, Spring 2009.

Kerouac...

2009-03-02T18:26:00.000-08:00

The Beats are fun. Period. Say what you will about their lit merit, but they shook it up and did it with style. Without them there would be no Andy Warhol, no factory, no Velvet Underground and the boho NY scene would be very different. The video is a nice montage to the original Kerouac and Steve Allen (of late night TV show fame) recording. A nice blend of ...Cody and ...Road.

Hopperesque

2009-02-22T14:28:00.000-08:00

Spent most of the weekend submitting manuscripts and poems to magazines and journals. A boorish exercise. Found a bunch of old photos and decided to post them to facebook. One find was an exterior shot of the North Street Playhouse. I played around with it and turned it into a painting.

Pushcart Nom Story...for those interested

2009-02-21T18:45:00.001-08:00

OF RUST AND WRECKAGE

They saw her leaning against the stop sign at the crossroads that was Main and Church of old Delmar, the town long boarded up and blasted away by the disappearance of the rails which had created it. What once had been a bright brick cross-street was now littered with Styrofoam cups, the occasional beer can, and dozens of cigarette butts. She was the one bright spot, her red hair like a spot of rust against the dull street and pavement, her legs tapering to ballerina-like feet as she absent-mindedly kicked pebbles. She was as old as they were, or perhaps a bit older. Her face had a sweet look that came from daydreaming too much, and not having a foot in the real world, and she didn’t appear to notice the boys, for she was spending too much time looking off into the soaped up windows of the old Radio Shack, which had long ago boxed it up for the highway.

“Let’s stop and see if she needs a ride.” Jackson said as they passed her. He followed her in the rearview as she grew smaller and smaller behind them. He admired her shape, her tight black tee against the gray smear behind them.

“I don’t know man, I kinda want to get home.” Kent wanted to count his money in the safety of his bedroom, where wind, water, or a woman wouldn’t put it at risk.

“Come on, she’s cute. Maybe she’ll have sex with us.”

“You’re retarded.”

“What?”

“Things like that don’t happen, Jackson. It’s like a law of physics.”

“Fuck physics, let’s pick her up. I want to talk with her. She’s hot.”

She was hot, they both knew it, and the kinds of girls they knew weren’t as nearly as attractive as this one, but they weren’t the kind of girls who were found at crossroads, either. Kent didn’t know why he agreed, but he found himself swinging the wheel and returning to the girl who swayed from side to side as if tuned into music, her face turned up to the sun. The truck sidled up to the curb and he leaned over getting a look at her. She was 19, maybe, with dark red hair and a face that was angles and lines. She was pretty, and freckled, and taut.

“Hey,” was all Kent mustered.

She didn’t say anything at first, and then Jackson’s mouth jump started.

“Hey, what’s up? My name’s Jackson and this here is Kent. We’re from down the road. We just come from the Junk Man, you might know him. He’s a character that junk man, I tell you what.”

“Down the road, huh? Junk man. Right.” She said in a voice rough with smoke and sand. “I hear it’s good down the road. That right?”

“I guess. Down, up, wherever.” Jackson replied. The air hung with heat. Ahead of the truck the highway wavered.

“My name’s Rachel.”

“Rachel, huh? Wanna ride?”

She did, and the boys took her in with calmness that surprised them both. She had the look of a girl who had been caught doing something illegal, sheepish grin and sheepish eyes that flashed steel if you caught them right, but only if you could catch them for she turned and hid her eyes from them knowing that if they could see them she would have been left behind, and she couldn’t stay at crossroads anymore. Not today.

She was a smoker and didn’t offer a cigarette to either of them, and they didn’t ask, and she sucked on the end of it like she was dying of thirst and the butts held water. Jackson noticed her hands trembling.

“Don’t worry about us, we won’t harm you. We’re good guys. Aren’t we Kent? Hell yeah, we just hard workers is all. Don’t mind all the dust on us. Rust. That’s what it is, you know? Rust. When metal oxidizes it gets discolored. And we got it all over us, man. Damn, I can’t wait for a shower. Really, I know it looks like dried blood, but it ain’t. Like I said, we’re the good guys.”

“I’m glad.” She exhaled out the window. “I’m sick of the other kind.”

“Sounds ominous,” Kent said. “You ain’t on the run are you? From no one. We don’t want trouble. Shit, I don’t want nobody’s daddy coming after me with a shotgun.”

“Daddy,” She exhaled. “That’s a good one. Jesus, no. I’m just. I’m just out.” She paused. “I’m just out for a walk, you know. Get out of the house.” Rachel laughed a high weedy laugh. She put her hand on the dashboard and straightened herself. “I ain’t never done this before.”

“What?” Jackson asked.

“Hitchhiked.”

“You’re not hitching. This isn’t hitching. We stopped for you,” Jackson said.

“And why was that?” Rachel asked.

“Because you’re cute.” Jackson said, smiling, his eyes flashing and blinking, and Rachel smiled back for a moment before turning back to the window and exhaling. Kent turned on the radio and began humming along to the commercial, a jingle for a local car dealer. Rachel turned and locked eyes with Jackson for a moment and then turned away, her smoke rolling out the window. “Where does it all go?”

“What?” Jackson responded. “Where does all of what go?” Jackson asked. She stared out the window at the scrub pines and loblollies that grew thick towards the Atlantic. They were a dark green dash against the hazy blue sky.

“The smoke. It goes out the window, but where does it go? Imagine. What comes out of my body could go all the way to China, or Europe.”

“Yeah. Pretty amazing. You know, I never smoked much, once on graduation night. A menthol. Hated it.”

Kent grunted. “What school did you go to?” He asked.

“I went to Stephen Decatur for a while.”

“Right on. We graduated two years ago. Arcadia. Glad that’s over with.” Jackson said. He liked her, she was different, and he felt like he was saving her from something, even if it was boredom. “Now we work the clam beds in the summer, or did,” he emphasized did, “and take on odd jobs. Kent here is a helluva mechanic. Got a job lined up with Harry at Goodyear, if Harry’s still busy in September.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah. Kent could repair the ass end of a tractor if it was on fire.”

“Ever work on Mack trucks?” Rachel asked. She cast the butt out the window and promptly lit another one. Her fingernails were dirty underneath, like she had been working with oil.

“Yeah, sometimes. Rebuilt an old lorry with my grandpa last summer. Lots of fun.”

“My boyfriend in high school was a gear-head.”

“Really?” Kent asked.

“Yeah, he had a nice job and he went and ruined his thumb one night when he tried to operate on a corvette while drunk off his ass.”

“Damn.”

“Tore it up. Had to quit that. Drives trucks now.”

“That sucks.” Jackson said. It grew quiet, the radio provided white noise.

Rachel looked out the window and finished her smoke before speaking.

“That’s okay, I made my mistakes too. It’s all right. We all loose a finger sometimes. Only sometimes we don’t know we lost it.”

“Wow, aren’t we philosophical,” Kent snickered. Jackson elbowed him, and Kent settled down. And again the cab was quiet. They had only been driving for a few miles. Kent wanted a destination, and Jackson wanted a destination that would lead to love. Neither of them knew what Rachel wanted. “Jackson here is my neighbor.” Kent said to break the silence. “We’re like brothers. I watch his back and he watches my back,” Kent said. He meant it as a warning and a promise. Kent meant it to end it, to be the statement that would make this girl request to be dropped off, so he could go about doing his business.

“That’s sweet.” Rachel said in a sing song voice. She went into her purse. “Listen my old man is a dick, on a bender, is all, and my friends are all gone this summer, and I’m sick of being stuck in this hell-hole with nothing to do.” She was speaking to both of them, but directed her tone to Kent. “I’m looking for some fun.” She inhaled sharply. “Damn.”

“What?” Jackson asked. He’d watched her rifle through her bag, but saw nothing more than make-up and scraps of paper. Her purse was floppy, barren, and stained with something that looked like tomato sauce.

“I thought I brought another pack of smokes. I guess I left them at the house.”

“We can stop, can’t we Kent.”

“Sure, I guess, I need to take a leak.”

“Tell you what, take me to buy some smokes and I’ll buy you guys some beer. There’s a beach I know about where we can hang out and ya’ll can wash this rust off.”

“Deal.” Jackson said.

Kent followed the road till he found a gas station, a Shore Stop that had once been shiny as a dime, but now was streaked with field dust and mold. Two beat-up cars were parked in front and a black man, rail thin, sat on the curb smoking a cigar, a bicycle kicked over at his feet. They didn’t need gas, so Kent parked the truck, which felt light to him, especially parking the old beast, and he hit the brakes a bit hard, and Jackson and Rachel rocked forward, Rachel’s hand reaching for Jackson’s knee.

“Sorry guys, foot’s kinda heavy.”

No one responded, and Kent hopped out along with Rachel, and they left Jackson in the truck who fumbled in his pants for his chewing gum.

Kent let Rachel go ahead of him, and he followed, his eyes running up her legs and up the moon of her back. She was pretty, he’d give her that, but she was off, and if he were back home he’d feel better about it, but something about being away from home, even if only a few hours away, lent her more danger than perhaps she warranted. They both edged to the front of the counter, and Kent expected Rachel to reach into her purse and pull a gun, but she didn’t, only scanned the cigarette stacks and columns above and behind the clerk.

“Restroom?” Kent asked.

“Here,” the clerk said, and tossed him a key attached to a wooden block of wood that read MEN. “Round back.”

“Thanks.”

The clerk paid him no mind.

Jackson stepped out of the car when he saw Kent heading for the bathroom. “Hey, she’s allright, right?”

“Dude, she’s weird. What ever you want to do let’s do it and get it over with. I want to go home.”

“Easy Kent, jury’s still out with her. The beach, that’ll be cool. Come on we worked so hard this morning. It’ll be nice to wash the skin off, drink a cool one. Maybe get some action.” Jackson gyrated and bounced with the possibility.

“Fine, let’s just not make a night of it.” And Jackson had to follow him in, and relieve himself, not for need of it, but for need of companionship and courage. And when they got out, Rachel was leaning against the truck, packing her smokes against the cup of her palm.

“You know I think I saw you guys earlier today, when I was walking into town. Loaded up full of junk, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Thought so, when you told me you had been to the Junk Man’s, I thought to myself, I wonder if these are the same boys I saw earlier.”

Anyone who saw the truck would have taken a second glance for it bounced and crowded the road. The large planes of rusting steel wangled, and the cubes of metal which were once stoves and dryers were so rusted red that you felt sorry for whomever had to touch the side, for the metal was furry and hairy as if with disease that to touch it would mean sickness. The various poles and odd spheres of iron and steel caught and reflected the sun light and bounced the light between the tight corridors between the refuse in the truck bed. From behind one might see the light play between the metal, like some sort of Morse code, or language. The haul was the color of smoke and sandpaper, still there was something beatific about the waste, something cocoon-like and hopeful, the promise of new life, as if the truck bed held a shred of survival in its palm.

“I bet you made a nice sum, Junk Man’s paying a good bit for crap these days.”

“Hell yeah,” Kent said, proud of his hard work and glad someone recognized his good idea and fortune. “Korea, China too, all that crap you saw today is going to be on its way to Asia. Junk Man says they need nickel and iron, or something.”

“Yeah, I hear.” Rachel said, “Enough gabbing, let’s have some fun.”

And Rachel’s idea of fun was a twelve pack of Natural Ice and two packs of menthol cigarettes, and she giggled in the lip of the can as she pointed the way to the beach, a fresh smoke stuck on her lip. Jackson had settled close to her and she liked his scent, and the two of them appeared comfortable with each other’s proximity.

“You’ll see a dirt road up ahead. It goes to a public landing. We go there sometimes and fuck around.”

Rachel opened her purse up and rooted around for a lighter. Jackson saw a wad of bills at the bottom; he also noticed a key ring loaded with corny key chains that said things like: Truckers do it Better, I’m wild, Don’t Mess With Texas, and the like. The kind of tacky gifts one found in truck stops across the country, and they jangled and knocked together as she pulled the camouflage lighter from the bottom.

“It’s a fun beach, private for the most part. Used to be a house, but it burned down. Some motherfucker tried to kill his wife, or something.”

“Really?” Kent asked.

“Maybe, that’s what the kids used to say in school. Cheated on him, or something. Anyway the wreckage is still there, you’ll see it.”

They reached the beach as the sun melted in a red and orange stain in the sky above the road and bled into the tree line and into the darkness of the pines, which promised that night was coming. They parked against the cuticle of sand and gravel, and Rachel squealed as the truck pulled into park. “I just love coming here,” she said, “Reminds me of the old days.” She hopped out and kicked off her shoes and ran towards the water’s edge. Her purse bounced around her body and her cigarette smoke trailed behind her like a scarf.

Kent wasn’t drinking, but Jackson had popped his second beer, the fumes of which filled the cab for a moment before evaporating in his wake as he exited and followed her. He too shouted and hooted as he gave chase. Indeed this was working out like Jackson had planned. But for Kent, anxiety crept into his legs and began its ponderous bouncing. He didn’t want to stay much longer, but he felt loyalty to Jackson and compromised his time. He would pace and wade, pace and wade. But he knew beer could lead to a longer engagement than he was prepared to commit to. He looked at Rachel; she looked gorgeous as she kicked in the surf. There were girls like her in school, and every one of them came with a warning.

Jackson stripped his shirt and whipped it behind him, and Rachel waded deeper into the water. The sky was a deep orange and looked to Jackson as if were about to separate from the darker background and fall like scrap towards them.

“Your friend doesn’t trust me. I can tell,” Rachel said.

“What do you want me to say?” Jackson asked.

“I don’t know. When you pulled up, I felt like it was a moment. You know. A moment that I couldn’t pass by.”

Jackson reached out for her hand. She took it and he pulled her close.

Jackson kissed her, and pulled her body into his, and she kissed him back. He felt her hesitation, but pushed it back with his mouth and hands, and her resistance melted. On the beach Kent grit his teeth. He swore and stood and turned on his heels. It gave him a sickly feeling in his gut. He walked around some scrub pines to where the old scratch of the fire ruins reached the water. He stood there for a while and looked into the scorch. There was little to tell: a fire, grass encroached upon the black spindles of frame. Kent stood there and then waded into the water where he washed his hands, and splashed water on his face. He didn’t know how long he had stayed, but when he returned Jackson and Rachel were a pair of entangled shadows that kissed and drank, and pushed each other in the breaking water. Night had come quickly on them but not on Kent who had kept his eye on his watch, and on his heart.

Kent had had enough and interrupted the couple, who giggled and exhaled and tugged on their clothes. After a few fumbling minutes of kisses and gulps of beer they piled in the cab, and Kent began the drive back.

“So where do you live?” Kent asked

“Not far.” Rachel said. She held onto Jackson’s hand and smoked, her exhalations escaping out the window in regular puffs.

“You want to be dropped off there?”

“Sure.” She said, and squeezed Jackson’s hand. “You guys can come in, but you can’t stay. Not even for a little.” She giggled.

“No problem,” Kent said. “Though lover-boy here will disagree with us both.”

Jackson smiled and kissed Rachel on the top of her head. They drove the rest of the way in silence save for the occasional directional from Rachel who had settled under Jackson’s arms. Kent thought it was imagination but he could have sworn that she was staring off in the marsh grass and the oily sky looking for someone. It was in the way she breathed, he thought, strained and stressed as if she knew her time was coming to an end.

Her house was a trailer near the side of the byway, and it stood out like a patch against inky pine dark, the trailer itself dirty, and dusky, and hairy with use. There was no one home, which seemed to relieve Rachel, for she sighed and loosened her grip on Jackson’s hand. The highway was deserted.

She invited them in and Jackson and Kent took her up on it, though Kent kept the truck running. He wanted Jackson to know he was on a leash. And they walked through the weedy yard and up the wooden steps to her home. The air hung with the salty rot of low tide. There was a waterway nearby, and Kent could make out the far cry of a marsh loon, which made him want to go home even more, if only to hear the familiar cries of the owl in his backyard. Inside it smelled of dog and cat piss, and smoke. And Rachel lit up fresh as she came in, and tossed her bag on the counter. Empty beer cans and whisky bottles were lined up on the counter. Above the television a wedding photo was marked with what looked like spaghetti sauce. Other pictures were overturned or at odd angles as if a pillow, or other object had been thrown at them.

“Nice place,” Jackson said, trying to be polite.

“It’s a shithole, but thanks.” Rachel opened the refrigerator and threw in the remaining twelve pack, and pulled one out for herself and another for Jackson.

Outside the sound of a Mack truck loomed. Jackson wondered how one could live so close to the highway, with the noise and fumes. Especially on this side road with it’s trucking corridors and port access ways. He could see the noise bothered Rachel, for she tensed up and began to tap her fingers against the counter. Their popped beers sounded like a lid being lifted from an ancient jar. Again the sound of the Mack groaned, and Rachel’s hands began to flutter. Kent stepped further inside the living room.

“How can you stand living so close to the road? It’s like in your living room.” Jackson said as he moved closer to Rachel, “I want your phone number. Maybe we can get together this weekend. I’m off, and we ain’t digging clams, not for a while, anyway. Maybe we could…”

“Yeah maybe,” Rachel replied.

Kent, eager to leave, scanned the room, he was drawn to the wedding photo and the red stain across the face of the glass. Rachel was evading Jackson’s advances and he was glad for that, maybe they would be going soon. Outside the rumble and boom of the truck enlarged. The bride and groom of the picture seemed happy, but it didn’t appear that they were happy any longer based on the look of the place. Rachel resembled her mother, Kent thought, and then peered closer. The woman in the picture was Rachel, the same steel in her eyes, the red ringlets of hair like springs in front of her face.

And suddenly there was silence outside. The truck had passed, or had it? Kent hadn’t been paying attention, listening to Jackson and looking at the photo. But Rachel knew, Kent could tell by looking at her. Her face was stiff and her hands like iron braces gripping the kitchen counter. He could see her jaw working a slow grind, and if Jackson would have shut his teeth, would have heard the slow crush of enamel on enamel. Then there was the sound of a door opening and closing, and Kent knew now that they had to leave, and Rachel knew it too, for she was already moving back around Jackson, who was oblivious, moving back deeper into the kitchen.

“Jackson, we got to jam.” Kent said, his voice hammering in his throat.

“Yeah, you should go.” Rachel said. She lit a smoke and winced. To Kent she looked like she was about to break into pieces from stress.

“Why?” Jackson said. “I’m not finished with my beer.”

“Come on, man, fuck your beer. Finish it in the car.” Kent said.

Then the door was slammed open and her husband, grizzled, grinding his teeth, face taut and angled, cut the room with his voice. “Whose fucking truck is out there, Rach? Huh?” And Rachel moved between Jackson, Kent and her man, blocking her man from the boys, from the front door. “What the hell is going on here?” He cussed and swore, but Kent didn’t listen, only pulled on Jackson’s elbow. There was a back door in the kitchen, and Kent moved towards it.

“Fucking bitch, what did I tell you?” He jerked her around and the force of it whipped her neck about.

“Hey don’t touch her!” Jackson shouted.

“Shut up,” Kent hissed at Jackson, pulling him back.

“Fuck you!” Rachel’s husband growled.

“Baby, come on, I got a bag full of money, let’s go get a room and relax. Come one baby. We’ll celebrate, like the old days.”

“Fuck off,” he growled.

“We’ll get some champagne…I’ll take care of you. Do that thing you like. ” Rachel cooed, her hands coaxing his chin. “You know how you get on the road, after all that no-doze and jolt, come on baby.” She soaked his ear in whispers and kisses and rubbed his chest, which bought Kent and Jackson enough time to slip out the back.

And they bolted around the trailer, through the maze of beach chairs and coolers, and instead of following the boys; Rachel’s husband kicked the front door open and jumped his way down the wooden stairs.

They leapt into the truck but Jackson did not escape the man’s fist as it raked across his lip. He laid in one punch and grabbed Jackson by the collar and punched him hard in the mouth, sending blood across the face of the dash. Jackson countered with a weak punch and jab, which was enough to separate himself from the angry man. The Mack blocked the head of the drive, but Kent gunned the old girl back, knocking the Mack hard in the teeth. He swerved and pulled the truck hard around and rolled over the edge of the yard, the headlights capturing, for a moment, Rachel pulling on her husband’s elbow, her mouth in rictus as her husband’s fist grappled with her neck, both of them shouting and spitting at each other in the dark.

“What the fuck!” Jackson screamed. In the rearview he could see Rachel taking a blow to the mouth, as her husband reeled back upon her. “We have to go back! We can’t leave her there. He’ll kill her.”

“Fuck that! Did you see that guy, he was hopped on trucker speed, I ain’t going back there.”

Jackson whimpered.

“Dude, you’re bleeding. He fucked your lip up.”

Jackson examined himself in the side mirror; he couldn’t see much but a bloody stain. His tooth wiggled.

“She’s married. The picture. Above the TV. It was her.”

Jackson pounded his hand on the dash. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Kent said.

Jackson beat his head against the dash. He moaned and cussed, and slapped the dash repeatedly. “Please tell me you have the money.”

“It’s in the glove box.”

“No it isn’t.” Jackson said, “She has it. In her purse.”

“What? Are you sure? I put it there before we left Junk Man’s.” Kent’s heart stammered as he maneuvered the back road murk. Please, he thought, not that, not that.

Jackson pulled open the glove box. It was black and empty, but he stuck his hand inside anyway, his fingers fluttering above the littered scraps of receipts and folded maps.
“It’s empty.”

“Son of a bitch!” Kent screamed.

“Why would she take it?” Jackson wondered.

“Because she’s fucking poor, dumbass. You saw her trailer. She’s desperate.”

“But not for money.”

“Just shut your damn mouth.” Kent yelled.

The old truck groaned, they had slowed down a bit to get there bearings. When they stopped a dark T-section Kent let the truck idle, trying to remember the best way to get to the highway.

Jackson sulked, and in the muffler silence a backfire, or gunshot, and the boys looked at each other. Then another.

“We should go.”

“We’re not going back, Jackson.”

“We have to do something. He could have killed her.”

“We’ll call the cops.” Kent argued.

“I don’t know her last name. I didn’t get her phone number.”

Kent sighed and turned the truck around, and they drove in crisscross passes around the area where they thought she lived, but found little they recognized. Without streetlights the crowned roads looked the same as they oozed out of the pinewoods. Once they thought they found it, but it was an old streamline rotting in the honeysuckle, kudzu vines erupting from the windshield. It made Kent think of the deer skulls in the woods and how weeds or vines would push up through the eye sockets. Through the search Jackson said little, his hands flexing into fists and out again. In the end Kent found his way to the highway, and Jackson dropped his head back and looked up into the cab’s ceiling. He looked past the ripped liner into the metal which was mottled like a moth’s wing, not with powder, but with rust, and outside the stars pushed against the haze. Somewhere behind them an old story retold itself to no one, and the boys drove home in muggy silence.

Will you wait for me? Will you play your music?

2009-02-14T07:52:00.000-08:00

Happy St. Valentine’s Day

Love. True love, is what brings us together, today.

In celebration of all things eros I’m posting some of my love poems. To my lovely of course! She rocketh my worldeth.

IVAN, AGAIN, WINTER 2007

Dark cupping the sides of your cheek
your breast anchored in his mouth,
winter dry heat and days on small sleep.
In a decade we will feast on these small memories,
and in doing so, begin to grow into relief,
the dizzy world about will make us mountains.

THE CITY MAKES YOU BEAUTIFUL

The city makes you beautiful
because when snow comes paling down
the only red will be the arc of your lips
as you light a cigarette, a crow
calling over your shoulder,
the heavy patter of the old school
echoing the falling snow.

The city makes you beautiful because the weight
of your breath is bigger,
heavy, and one must frame herself
as the T rumbles in--a hot and humid exhalation,
and only a busker breathes.
A quarter rings
in her cup
as the subway comes to a stop.

One must quicken
between shadows,
all light sucking up and out
over your shoulder
like a boomcrane swing,
and you look up,
into the dim snow.

The city makes you beautiful
because neon lights add a layer of skin
upon your skin, a skein of light that rolls
over all of us, and none of us
are immune to the light.

The city makes you beautiful
because you walk everywhere and walk everywhere
and are alive in the reflections
that run through this city.

Across deep alleys come the brightest stars
which are not stars but the sodium shield
that cups cement fields and gives
glow to rusty steel. The city makes
you beautiful because
across the iron color
you pause to stroke a pebble out of your shoe
and continue on like a whisper.
BREAD DAYS

Bread days you are bent over so the curve of our life together
exists in your motion
spreading the dough, your breasts swinging
and I imagine they swing towards my open mouth
and your nipples grow large in each sucking pass.
Later warm bread slides over my teeth
the meat of the slice divided by tongue.

The moving backwards of your hips
is in your skin as well as your lips,
flushed with oven work and kneading.

ON SUMMER NIGHTS WHEN

Cocked at an angle, the radio’s antenna frames
the candlelight theatre upon the apartment walls.
The shadows could be anything,
strangled lovers, entangled branches,
but for now they are candle throws
and a woman rolls on her side to watch
and hums the melody ballooning from the salt-box radio,
The sweat on her thighs lifting into an aura
around her body, her lover long in the shower
leans and lurks beyond her sight.
She supposes she should dress
and prepare for dancing, but instead listens
to the lone radio as the music loops and lopes, loops
and lopes, circles back
to bass and strikes drum again.
Desire dilates air,
and the music makes it sound
as if the whole world celebrates in dark alleys,
on a night when one’s body
is more than a body, but an invitation to touch.

The angle of the radio’s antenna looks like the skeletal frame
that rises above the stage floor and into black,
inside the theatre two windows down,
where the music from the radio wavers
Loops and circles
and strikes
and goes unnoticed
because at this point in the rehearsal no one wants to be there,
the director, the actors,
not even the characters.
It’s too much,
the heat and wet night, the tension
of the Loman house.
The stage manager daydreams
of her new lover’s fine mouth,
and casts herself beyond the building, into darkness
where a pair of hands twist her body.
The director, stares into the floor,
waiting for the actors to awaken
among the snack wrappers, coke cans,
ripped hose, and
limp cigarette packs
that appear, in shadow,
to bury themselves into the floor
as if they didn’t want to be found,
to instead become a mosaic
of our appetites
and live on forever like stars
beneath their feet.
Even here the radio lacquers space, the music
beyond the walls,

beyond the curve of her thighs,
beyond the loping satellite passing through
the house of the twins.
The sloppy piano continues its drag
and crawl out of the speakers
as skateboarders rattle
and box their boards,
scrape their wheels,
their cigarettes a jagged line of Christmas lights
that promise soft dark, that wink
behind the beer bottles passing from one hand
to another, to another
as the music loops and lopes, loops
and lopes, circles back to bass,
and strikes drum again.

On a night that’s all about escaping skin,
and learning to live in it
the skein of bedding is pulled tight between her thighs
and her aura settles into a white chocolate glow,
she watches her lover dress and dash cologne about his throat
and next door the neighbors begin their ritual, their voices lap
against the air as they comb their hair, make their tricks,
the radio cutting and fading out, and coming to life again

and it’s like the street lives in a giant mouth, hot, damp, and dark,
the ache for teeth is welcoming
and the urge to be swallowed irresistible.

HOLDING HANDS. SUMMER

But do you not feel them too? The moments our tongues complete
the synaptic gap of our shared mouth,
that a simple touch from your finger
signals inside me a great calm, as if a switch had been flipped.
Would you have believed it possible?

Like the tendrils of the jellyfish who touch and in touch
return to touch, and tangle and grow into one,
we hold hands and walk down the street.

AWAKE. AFTER MIDNIGHT. CIGARETTES.

Can’t you see my bones?
They are the gleaming rails
of lacquered coffins

bearing bodies to seed the fields
beyond the seal skin shack
at the edge of the wood.

I too tramp wastes,
search for me between your fingers
and the rag down t-shirts I slept in

that summer at the cabin,
before Boston and varied streets,
the wild avenue parties.

Oh to become lost in a city
is like feeling your skin
for the first time

the strange doorknobs shaking hands,
the flattened brickyard cheeks,
to shout down the throat of the street

while drunk is to be bigger
than you once were
which was small, like a stone, like a bean.

Good Doc

2009-02-11T17:18:00.000-08:00

Ah, post show depression.

Yes indeed.

Last weekend the drama clubs/departments of Arcadia, Chincoteague, Nandua, Northampton, Pocomoke High Schools, and Broadwater Academy, collaborated to perform N. Simon's The Good Doctor at North Street Playhouse.

In tough economic times, the show was a win, win sitch. It costs us nothing to perform the show (N. St. picked up the rights) and each club (plus N. St.) pocketed some cash

Sweet.

Enjoy the slide show to your left.

Elvis has left the building.

Jackson Pollock's Birthday

2009-01-28T17:20:00.000-08:00

Ah. Abstract art. No matter if you love it, hate it, or couldn't care less, you probably know of Pollock.

I'm not a huge fan of JP the person, but the artist interests me, and one of the best looks at the man happens to be a biography of a poet I admire, Frank O'Hara. City Poet by Brad Gooch is a great read, and if you love the New York Bohemian art scene and literary scene it's a must. While O'Hara worked as an art critic he ran around with Pollock and his crew. Fun stuff, sometimes brutal, but always fascinating.

So on Pollock's birfday, as my four year old would say, become the painter for a while. Check it out at http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

Double click your mouse to change colors. Drag your mouse like a paintbrush.

Enjoy!

Appearing now in the newest issue of The Broadkill Review: Cecila Wolochs Narcissus

2009-01-28T10:54:00.000-08:00

Personal note: Not my best...but crunched in a day

Postcards from the Mirror: Cecelia Woloch’s Narcissus

“I doubt/ I am aware” is etched into the WC mirror in Café Les Philosophes, and it isn’t hard to imagine the speaker of Cecelia Woloch’s Narcissus edging away from the mirror, wondering who am I? How did I arrive?

Woloch’s elegy to worn-out love echoes with doubt, and eventually hope, and is haunted by desire, “We were husband and wife in that house because that's what we'd been pronounced,” she states in “Postcard to Kim from The Cafe Les Philosophes,” as if by addressing her failing love is the way back to love, a journey fraught with danger, both physical and romantic. While walking with a spouse/lover along the Lethe he “plucked from the grass/ a single flower by its throat/ to shut me up.…” presumably the same lover who in “Postcard to Kim” “was angry and swinging a bat. He was maybe drunk. It was maybe my fault.” The striking image of the small flower, perhaps a Narcissus, choked by the hands of someone you once loved is arresting; the passion is present, the anger of choked flower, the swinging bat, as is the strident ache of self-destruction. She’s choosing this lover, at least for the time. Woloch does not play the blame game, nor offers explanations for despair. This is the speaker’s heart, take it or leave it, “guilty coat” and all.

Throughout Narcissus Woloch mirrors imagery: bird, wing, salt, mirror, silver, kissing mouths. They are like wild flowers at the edge of a meadow, and Woloch, as if standing by a pool, plucks at their reflection, the ripples spreading out like a shudder following a lover’s touch. The images double so that the “sparrow of her heart” returns as the wing-like “white sleeve of a blouse” of two older lovers, and as bones from a meal of birds in “Wish,” where the lovers “have never touched one another enough/…have never completely eaten fill.”

It is the hunger of love the speaker wrestles with, and identity of love, how easy it is to become the loved, something possessed, something held so tight it cannot breathe. “Even my sleep belonged to him./ Even my rising, almost weightless/ — bride of everything — was his.” This possession of spirit is an iron spike in the heart of the first section, whose bitter lover wants a woman who “was salt, a woman weeping,” that he cannot, or chooses not to look upon, and who keeps a “house of shut-up-and-lock-the-doors,” the speaker’s own voice empty as Echo’s voice must have been when Ovid imagined her alone, bodiless, unable to love, to touch anymore, spurned by Narcissus, and by her own desire made silent.

Many of the poems in Narcissus are postcards, and the epistle form serves Woloch well, adding an air of homesickness to the already sorrowful tone. The exotic enhances the longing and haunting, especially in “Postcard with Lisa, to Lisa, From Metro Line 1” where a man falls to his knees, bloodied and speechless, where some of the passengers do nothing, “A young girl clipping her fingernails furiously, clippings falling into her lap.”
What becomes the bloodied stranger is mystery.

But what becomes of the hero of these poems? Is there a happy ending in sight? The speaker who, if not running towards the future with open arms, is at least moving towards healing, “It's the middle of our lives and night and we walk toward everything,” she states in “Postcard with Sarah, To Sarah…,” and then later dreams of a “country… steep as a mirror.”

But Woloch’s speaker is wild as any weed, as any wing from a bird aloft, “How lovely, the way we wreck ourselves on the world; how we shine in it, too,” the speaker pines in “Girl in a Truck…” which begins the second section of Narcissus. The speaker has returned, not only to America, to Georgia, but to where love “made a sparrow of my heart//Whose name is light inside my mouth.” The speaker is reenergized, but even this love aches with danger despite a fresh start in “New Year:” “We might have escaped, then, those other doomed loves. Though maybe those other doomed loves were our fate… we got back in the truck like two fugitives, dark heart, back on that sky of a road.”

The speaker’s desire is matched only by her “own wild emptiness,” and in the end hopes her heart could be freed “might be lifted and cupped, again lifted, let go.” Woloch’s lyric and prose poems are liquid, much like smoke, rivers, or the path of a worn-out sparrow striking across a meadow, Narcissus is damaged beauty, the hope for love echoing through its movement.

Arts Cuts Coming Down the Pipe

2009-01-27T17:25:00.000-08:00

(Shoulder shrug)

Can't exactly say I didn't see it coming. When doom and gloom loom 'round the corner...cut the arts.

Worcester County is shaving money off the music budget for the next two years, at least. Accomac County is looking to cut 66 jobs, which means arts positions, if left vacant, will not be filled.

And that's just for the 09-10 school year. Deeper cuts are always a possibility.

But what remains is a will to power.

Fund-raise, beg, borrow, steal, and think outside box.

A DIY approach to school arts programs.

Already the theatre departments of Northampton, Nandua, Arcadia, Broadwater Academy, and Pocomoke High Schools in Maryland are combining forces to produce a show at a neutral site, North Street Playhouse.

While the show will not bring in hundreds of dollars, each school stands to make a nice chunk of change to pay for royalties for spring shows.

On line links to my work, new and old

2009-01-19T18:22:00.001-08:00

http://public.coe.edu/coereview/coereview/backissues/cr_33.pdf#Page=49
“Diagram of a Walking Poem”

http://www.deadmule.com/poetry/2007/07/s-scott-whitaker-poetry/
“To the Loggerhead”
“Put to good use”
“Tobacco Tax”

http://www.depoetry.com/poets/200706/whitakerscott.html
“On Summer Nights When”
“Put to Good Use”
“The Cartographer’s Mistake”
“Umpire School”

http://cutbankpoetry.blogspot.com/2007/10/blame-everything-on-love-on-beekeepers.html
Review: “Blame Everything on Love”

http://www.friggmagazine.com/volumeonearchive/archivedirectory.htm
http://www.friggmagazine.com/volumeonearchive/jean.htm
http://www.friggmagazine.com/volumeonearchive/ophelia.htm
http://www.friggmagazine.com/volumeonearchive/suchaday.htm
“Jean”
“Dear Ophelia”
“Such a Day is This”

http://www.sundress.net/stirring/archives/v2/e8/whitakers.htm
“Disembodied”

http://www.havescripts.com/Book_Wildeness_Review_Broadkill.html
Review: “Got Story?”

http://www.capegazette.com/storiescurrent/200712/miltonpoetry120707.html
About The Dogfish Head Poetry Prize

http://www.bayoakpublishers.com/mht2.htm
About Bay Oak Publishers

http://www.finishinglinepress.com/catalog.htm
About Finishing Line Press

Good weekend

2009-01-19T11:57:00.003-08:00

This past weekend began with a nice mellow Friday, the end of HSA testing, and then, gasp, a Pushcart Nomination for Fiction, which is pretty cool, all on top of the final hours of GWB presidency (do I dare say presidency?)

I started this blog to both give myself an easy publishing outlet, as well as store a bunch of ephemra I am drawn to, and in the spring this blog will backup my professional arts and humanties blog with Delmarva Quarterly.

Back on election night I wrote something for our president elect. A hopeful little thing...I've revised it some. And just for fun I'm posting my jab at GWB...I couldn't just make fun of his incompetence, I had to nail him for having no love in his wee heart.

11/5/08 CNN PROJECTS OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT- 11:00 PM

Because Obama has won today
one must force change

which translates into:

cut out junk food, car pool, save, avoid the drive through, invest wisely, volunteer, turn off the TV, read more poetry, read more books. Tell jokes.
If your hair is white
dye it blue. If it is blue dye
it pink. If you drink
too much, learn to like yoga, or poetry,
or painting, or buy art to caress all your days.

If you hate your body change it
and wear the disguises you admire,
they are no more different than boiled bones,
arrowheads, gold chains, black
Wall Street suits.

Because Obama won today
chew patience, for long years
of slow work are paved only one city block at a time.
How long did it take to build the Parthenon?

Because Obama won today
keep it real. Because
Obama won
today
allow yourself
to open up
like the country once was.
Not the geography,
but the spirit.

Because Obama won today eat color,
lean your life, give your heart away.

PRESIDENT BUSH DOES NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO

Once,
it was his turn to nurse the baby,
and bottle warm in hand, stepped
into her room,
she writhed with maturing bone
and he watched her
turn like a fist, dumb
to what he accomplish with touch.

The memory of that night
hangs on his bones like snake skin.
He has walked in the wood,
he has witnessed suffering.
The stones he has carried turn over in his sleep,
they become dreams where his teeth fall out
and hang by nervy string.
He cannot stop counting them.
They are like white statues falling

in a square, white sun
on tombstones that whiten air
as they recede beyond the pines.
He gauges only what is his to lose.

Advisors speak.
He looks towards the polished lawn. Recalls
his girls singing and picking daises,
but there is no clover, no bees,
only green silence. His daughters
have moved out of his voice,
a room they occupied once.
It is quiet. He wonders
where have the honey bees gone,
where are they now?

Pushcart hyper frenzy

2009-01-18T18:56:00.001-08:00

Not that I'd win. Really. The competition is ...tough (cough, adjust shirt and tie). But to be nominated is like humbling.

2008 Pushcart Nominee! Whoopee!

2009-01-18T18:28:00.000-08:00

Today I learned that I was nominated for a 2008 Pushcart Prize for fiction.

Stunned.

Thanks to Jamie Brown and the Broadkill Review for nominating my story "Of Rust and Wreckage."

Will keep you aprised of any further news.

Thanks all!

16 degress and getting colder...

2009-01-17T07:03:00.000-08:00

It's a bustle

And so cold your lips turn to glass when the air meets them

Like kissing a frozen pond

and your lungs pause and hitch

and only the birds know what you are feeling

Better late than never...

2009-01-04T09:33:00.000-08:00

And of course I've lost my notes. Alas. I am late to the party, again.

Early December rang in the holiday season, for poetry lovers in Delmarva, with a rousing start to the 10th annual John Milton Poetry Festival. Following an interesting panel discussion of publishing poetry with Schyullkill Review's Peter Krok, Broadkill Review's Jamie Brown (organizer of the event), Delmarva Quarterly's Dennis Forney, Delaware Poetry Review's Michael Blaine, Beltway Poetry Quarterly's Kim Roberts, and Bay Oak Publishing's HA Maxson, was a three hour poetry reading featuring the best of the region. Only one picture survived and I'm not even sure who she is...did I mention I lost my notes?

A fabulous time in the great redbrick Milton theatre.

10th Annual John Milton Poetry Festival, Milton DE.

2008-12-02T17:01:00.001-08:00

If you're on the pennisula and you'd like a great sampling of the local and impressive literary scene check out the John Milton Poetry Fest. There's Dogfish Head Beer, and Milton fetaures a hip local bookstore, a cozy pub and quaint Victorian architecture.

Again here's the official release:

WORKSHOPS, EXHIBITIONS, AND SPECIAL EVENTS10th Annual John Milton Memorial Poetry Festival, December 6 and 7, Milton Theatre, 110 Union Street, Milton, DE. Festivities on Saturday begin at 12:30 and include: a reading from Milton's "Ode on the Morning of Christ's Naticity" followed by a performance by the Salisbury University Chamber Choir; an editors and publishers panel at 2:00 pm featuring Beltway Poetry Quarterly, the Delaware Poetry Review, The Broadkill Review, Delmarva Quarterly, Bay Oak Publishers, Delmarva Review, Dreamstreets, and the Schuylkill Valley Journal; and readings by the winner of the 6th annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prize and other poets in the afternoon and evening. Sunday features a reading by Milton public school poets, and a 3:30 dedication of a life-sized bronze statue of John Milton in Mill Park on Wagamon's Pond. Free Admission. http://www.miltontheatre.org/

But the release doesn' t really do this fine festival justice. The mood is jovial, warm and everybody has a good ear. Come drink coffee, beer, toast Milton, the old bastard, and eat some art.

According to http://www.typealyzer.com/....

2008-11-22T07:07:00.000-08:00

The analysis indicates that the author of http://fieldrecord.blogspot.com/ is of the type:
ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts. The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

New Broadkill Review Out Today. My review of Peter Kruk's Looking for an Eye is posted below

2008-11-22T04:50:00.000-08:00

Night. Lamplight. A lover’s touch. Piano enlarging the air.

If the cover design on Peter Krok’s Looking for an Eye were an album cover, the green eye lurking at the edge of Stephen King’s dock would fit nicely among dusty 13th Floor Elevators records, Cramps singles, and Ramones LPs in a bedroom adorned with B movie posters promising doom, doom, doom. It’s a whimsical cover; the menacing shadow on the planks reminds me of a man with an axe. Or a hook. The more I look at it the more I think it’s a hook. Plus it feels as if I’m looking into the eye of the Incredible Hulk, the eyelid as green as radioactive rage.

Looking for an Eye could have been called Looking for a door, or an exit, or an answer, or for rhythm; and Krok’s new collection is like listening to well traveled busker, his cap like an overturned spider on the concrete before him, the next T already spilling out of dark tunnels.

It’s not that he’s writing bluesy alt-beat poetry or anything of the sort; Krok crafts image driven poetry centered around his home, both visceral and that of memory, and of course his heart. And the book might as well been called Searching for a key, for the landscape is littered with music, voices, and sound.

Some of the best moments are when Fur Elise echoes through the home, cool darkness pressing against the lamplight. For Krok, music, and sound are just as important as the images he frames with sparse form, or the landscapes he visits.

And there are people there too, not huddling around a campfire near Stephen King’s dock, avoiding the gaze of the grouchy Hulk, but working long hours, coming home to dose up on late night TV or searching neighborhood trash cans for reusable stuff. They are touching images, and earnest, and Krok, in these poems, acts as advocate, voice, and eye for the lower class and working class people of his neighborhood.

In the end Looking for an Eye makes an appropriate title, for Krok’s work is anchored by image. Some of the poems, in particular the elegies towards the end, travel smooth like old cowboy boots, for when the poet marries image with the iambic rhythm of really good conversation the poems break into easy strides; driving through Ohio, boarding the city bus, a lover’s touch.

Surrealism simmers in a few of these poems as the city darkens, “My City” and “10 PM At a Philadelphia Rec Center” among them, and Krok plays with WC Williams in “Dodge Poetry Festival” when he relishes a portabella mushroom sandwich like a widow relishes plums; conversations Krok allows us to eavesdrop upon.

Sometimes his eye does more talking than his ear, such as in “Girl with Bass Fiddle” where the poor musician is frozen by his eye, but Krok, like a busker, plays with the reader as if the reader was a listener, coin in hand, such as in “Athens, OH” where he teases out the music of the word Ohio, then drops the music, the assonance, half way through the poem, only to pick up on it at the end and echo it in the following poem, “The Ride We Left Behind.” Like a barroom piano player Krok returns to riffs and keys, the manuscript a carefully crafted playlist. And he returns to youth at the end, and in “Returning” the speaker graces the old cathedral of youth “to prepare for the voice/ behind the curtain and tomorrow;” voices aches and bend the air throughout the manuscript.

Krok’s a prodder, unafraid to question, unafraid of the question, a noble tradition in its own right, whose heart is centered, seeking a way to end the nagging that is to be alive and a feeling person in a country littered with noise, spin and easy fixes.

And perhaps that is why the Incredible Hulk at the end of Stephen King’s dock is so angry, no one bothers to stop and question anymore, at least that’s what the Hulk would like us to believe. Certainly Krok thinks that questioning is important, to stare yourself down, to ask “…who am I in the scheme/of things? What kind of noisemaker would you call me?”

2008-11-15T16:02:00.000-08:00

Arts in the classroom. Worcester County Tenth Grade English students make plaster Greek Masks for their study of Antigone.

Students were to design a mask based on one of the main characters, pair the mask with quotes that epitomize that character, and write a brief explanation of their design.

Another Historic Moment

2008-11-11T16:39:00.000-08:00

After such an emotional high last week O flexes his muscles and gives us a glimpse of the drama to unfold. Check it out on Boston.com

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/11/obama_puts_leas.html?s_campaign=8315

The 10th Annual John Milton Poetry Festival

2008-11-09T17:53:00.000-08:00

Yours truly will be reading mid-afternoon on Saturday December 6th in Milton, DE. A cute seaside town. Come on for good beer, and great regional poetry.

From the official release by the John Milton and Company Bookstore

The Event itself begins with the opening of the Milton Theatre's doors to the public at 12:00, with Dr. T. Ross Leasure reading John Milton's "Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity" as a prelude to the Salisbury University Chamber Choir's musical performance of the introduction to that Ode, followed by a concert of Renaissance choral music. At 2 PM the Delmarva Poetry Publishers and Editors group will take the stage to answer questions from the audience, and brief readings by invited poets who have been published in those Publishers and Editors' magazines. At 3 PM the marathon "Readers Reunion" begins. Following a dutch treat dinner atIrish Eyes, direectly across from the Theater, the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize evening will begin at 7:30 with readings by a few special guests, followed by the presentation of the 6th Annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prize by Dogfish Head founder and CEO Sam Calagione, with a reception and book signing to follow.

Sunday the 7th of December, the 75th Anniversary of Delaware Day, will see student-poets from the three Milton Public Schools recite their prize-winning poems, while a concurrent VIP reception occurs in the Parish Hall of St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church. Bagpipers will lead processions from both locations at 3PM to Milton's Mill Park for the dedication and unveiling of the John Milton Memorial Statue a mere two days before John Milton's 400th Birthday. The dedication will be followed by a dutch treat John Milton Day Dinner at Irish Eyes to benefit the Milton Community Foundation, which has undertaken the fundraising effort necessary for the cost of the statue and its installation.

2008-11-09T17:52:00.000-08:00

Some great links to regional literary hubs. Check them out!

http://www.delmarvareview.com/
http://workinprogressinprogress.blogspot.com/2008/09/delmarva-review-call-for-submissions.html
http://www.easternshorewriters.org/
http://wordpress.com/tag/delmarva-review/
http://www.depoetry.com/index1.html
http://www.dogfish.com/news/Enter_Now_To_Win_Dogfish_Head_Poetry_Prize/1256/20080501/index.htm

Outside the T—for Billy Bragg

2008-11-08T16:07:00.000-08:00

Outside the T

The strident chords progress through the neural network
to the skin
from the heart to the strings on the electric guitar.

The people spilling out of T stop and toss a coin
or two,
the man doesn't notice,
he's channeling Billy Bragg, and keeping one eye
on his hat.

Autumn hats patrol the street.

Those who stay to watch the showman
witness his hands transform into fighting birds
moving up and down the branch of his guitar.

Because Obama has won today

2008-11-04T20:38:00.001-08:00

Because Obama has won today
one must force change

which translates into:

cut out junk food, car pool, save, avoid the drive through, invest wisely, volunteer, turn off the TV, read more poetry, read more books. Get off oil.
Tell jokes. Help your kid with their homework.
If your hair is white
dye it blue. If it is blue dye
it pink. If you drink
too much, learn to like yoga, or poetry,
or painting, or buying art.

If you hate your body image, change it
and wear the gowns and disguises you admire,
they are no more different than boiled bones,
arrowheads and gold chains. They are no more
different than charcoal suits.

Because Obama won today
chew patience, for long
years of slow work
are paved only one city block at a time.
How long did it take to build the Parthenon?
Because Obama won today
keep it real.
Because Obama won today
allow yourself to open up,
like the country once was;
Not the geography, but the spirit.

Because Obama won today
eat color, lean your life, give your heart away.

You must change your life.

Obama

2008-11-03T17:04:00.000-08:00

On the eve of the 2008 election consider the mythos of America, a frontier place where once anyone could make anything happen; a vague dream that is recounted in family mythos across the country.
But Obama, symbolically, is a global minded leader, who happens to be African-American. To have another old white guy in charge would be like living in America where Sam Adams didn't throw tea into the Harbor.
Hyperbole?
I don't think so. In this day of technology, the fact that Obama has steamrolled this past year is nothing short of a techno-geek-youth driven movement that stands in the face of corrupt oil money, and entrenched politics that would make Boss Hogg blush.
No matter what you believe about education, foreign policy, Iraq, if you vote Republican and you make less than $200,000 a year, then your voting against a party whose day to day economic policies have you in mind. That means higher taxes at times, but after this 700 Billion dollar bailout, taxes will rise no matter who wins.

diversions

2008-10-14T06:38:00.000-07:00

Fun diverting quiz...who were you in your past life?

Op-Ed Columnist - Are We Rome? Tu Betchus! - NYTimes.com

2008-10-12T07:56:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist - Are We Rome? Tu Betchus! - NYTimes.com

Great read...a must for lovers or teachers of Latin, the classics, and Julius Caesar.

Reach Out and Touch Some Sculpture: Albert Kellam Doughty Shapes Steel into Natural Wonders

2008-09-17T18:04:00.003-07:00

Sculpture’s wonderful appeal is play. You can touch it, feel the cold material, rub your fingers over the bumps, generate friction against the surface, and rap your knuckles against the surface. And good sculpture is geography; your skin reacting to the relief of the material, while eyes drink in the details, you are transported to another landscape.

Great painting, for me anyway, is like good sculpture, you want to reach out and touch the canvas, which of course is a no-no, which is why I like Van Gogh, among others, because I want to press my skin against the brush strokes and feel the shape and pattern of the artist’s movements.

On the Eastern Shore of Virginia metal sculptor Albert “Buck” Kellam Doughty shapes slices of the Delmarva Peninsula out of steel, iron and scrap metal.

And his work makes you want to reach out and touch it.

For an area that’s textually rich with marsh grass, swamps, dense forests, black top soil, not to mention the bayside and seaside waters, Doughty blends the very earth and fruit of land and sea together in palpable, fun, and striking dimensions that not only make you want to play with his creations, you want to jump into them.

Doughty is the winner of several awards, including Best in Show at the Chesapeake Virginia Beach Fine Arts Festival, and for having only been making art professionally for a few years, he’s off to a quick and hot start. As hot as the metal he shapes. Talk to him about his creations and you’d think he’d been doing it his entire life. “I can make anything; you name it I can make it. Clams, trees, crabs, it doesn’t matter,” Doughty told me at a recent show at the Blarney Stone Pub in Onancock. While some might scoff at such confidence, once you see his grape vine, or his sprawling gothic trees, you can’t really argue with the man.

The fact that he even uses scrap metal, often donated or found, rather than refined metal makes his work even more eco-hip.

Heck, Doughty even uses old farm tools to shape his vision from molten steel.

And he’s just getting started.

What I like best are his natural shapes, the deer in the bog (my four year old couldn’t stop playing with the indestructible key piece), the pointed menace and mystery of the trees, the perfect round grapes of the Best in Show winning grape vine, the Jimmy Blue crab rising out of the murk. If it sounds too provincial for you consider that Doughty makes one of kind creations. If you want something he’s boasted he can make it.

Born out of a Hog Island lineage, Doughty’s family roughed out the early part of the 1900s on a fly and mosquito ridden Hogg Island working oyster beds, fishing and hunting the marshes, ferrying Northerners out on the water on fishing and duck hunting trips, and tending the wild hogs that tore from one side of the island to the next. The island was only accessible by boat, and like the island, Doughty’s creations are tough and beautiful at the same time, like the skin of a shark, or the carapace of a loggerhead turtle.

And if you’ve had the pleasure of touching either of those, you know the thrill in touching something that is once exquisite and tough

You can contact the artist at: http://hogislandcreations.com/

Clone Schmone: New Star Wars movie is more of the same

2008-08-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

In defense of the Clone Wars

The latest Star Wars film, the animated action adventure The Clone Wars is not good theater, nor is it good theatre, it’s only a mediocre kids movie at that.

So why defend it?

I’ve read about a dozen reviews which slam the film for being what the franchise became as soon as the Ewoks took over Jedi in the mid-eighties…wooden and dumb. Of the seven movies only four of them are good, and only two are great. When Lucas revisited the story line he began with episode IV in the 70s it was the cinematic equivalent of the Stones reuniting for yet another world tour. The newest four films are rehashed formulas with familiar rhythms parents and their small children can move in and out of with ease. Look R2 is going to fall off a cliff and scream….Look Threepio is going to make an awkward entrance….Look Anakin’s got that dark glint in his eye again…oh no another cheeky droid soldier!

The animation style of the Clone Wars is a mix of blocky game enhanced graphics with shades of paint thrown in. In one scene R2’s dome looks like a charcoal painting and much of the images of the planets are spectacular while many of the characters have near simian or block cut features. I didn’t find the human images as distracting as other reviewers, but at least the style is distinct.

The action is what you’d come to expect from Star Wars films, lots of zipping ships, fancy lightsaber clashes with a few tired one-liners thrown in for the ten year olds. Empire Strikes Back it ain’t.

Yet my four year old loved it and in-between explosions you could hear the little kid chatter of preschoolers asking their parents “where’s R2D2?...what’s happening, Mommy?...is Luke Skywalker in this movie, Daddy?” There was even rousing applause at the end. Somebody liked it.

What kills me about most reviews is that they still hope that Lucas will resurrect that old cinema magic from IV, V, and heck, even Raiders. That’s a crazy notion for what little of that magic left sizzled to embers in Jedi and didn’t burn again until III when Anakin became Darth Vader. What I haven’t read is how CW could have, and should have broken from the formula altogether. For once there is a variation of the John Williams theme (disappointing) and there is no rolling narrative script to update the audience, instead it was like news footage that accompanied matinee and bijou flicks in the forties. Which would have been cool if the director had seen this through, panning back to an audience of aliens, or an audience of one…instead the action rolled on, a machine powered by Lunchables, Legos, and action figures. Just like the films have been since the beginning; a kids virtual megaplex of possible playworlds and toy combos. To think CW would be anything else is contrary.

But still…the animation could have freed up some money to hire a dialogue coach, or a character coach. To that end CW took only one risk…Zero, Jabba the Hutt’s uncle, leader of the Hutts, and owner of a seedy club on the city planet of Coruscant. He spoke English with a fey southern accent that reminded me of Tommy Lee Jones’ corrupted New Orleans pansexual in JFK, and was either tattooed or made up like a Mardi Gras reveler. Zero’s voice and characterizations are jarring, out of place, and at times ridiculous for the adult, but humorous for the ten year old, but at least someone took a risk with something other than silly bad guy names like Dooku or Ventress, whose characterizations are shades of Vader circa 1982.

Clone Wars isn’t great, but it isn’t nearly as bad as many reviewers perceive. Compared to the folly of Jar Jar and the wooden romance of episode II, it’s just more of the same tired Lucas.

Got Story? A Wilderness of Riches is a rich and layered work of narrative poetry

2008-08-16T07:27:00.000-07:00

Reprinted from The Broadkill Review. If you would like any information on The Broadkill Review contact me and I’ll forward you information from the publisher, poet and critic Jamie Brown, Milton, Delaware.

While I sat in a chipped school desk, its layers of pressed composite peeling back like the shell of a soft crab, my fourth grade teacher asked me to read aloud the section of our history book that dealt with Pocahontas being baptized, and when I read the sentences, my elementary brain paused, both with thrill and delight, at the mention of Reverend Alexander Whitaker, who shared my surname. Mrs. Jarvis asked me if I was related and I didn’t know what to say; I nodded or grunted goat-like and kept on reading, thrilled with the recognition that my name existed outside of my body, my life, that there was a bit of myself floating up in history, typed on the moldy, musty pages of our text. Alas, it turns out I wasn’t related to Alex Whitaker, not directly, anyhow; my own roots belonged to a indentured servant on the eastern shore of Maryland, rather than to the parson who would eventually help found Henrico county, near Richmond. However, the thrill of that near-discovery stayed with me. Names, as it turns out, and their place in history, can strike mystery in one’s imagination, a feeling of existential discovery shared by many of the voices in Lenny Lianne’s A Wilderness of Riches (Scriptworks Press, Virginia Beach) which recounts the Jamestown settlement in first-person narrative poems.

There is much to discover in the book, and if one does not remember much about the Jamestown settlements from elementary school, Lianne lends a hand with carefully documented details – settlers’ occupations, local flora and fauna -- concerning the crossing. Her volume is broken into four sections: one from John Smith’s perspective, one from Pocahontas’ perspective, one from the perspective of potential brides shipped to the new world, and finally, a section shaped by the landscape, both natural and political.

To say that the poems are a story would be too simple, but it is a narrative we know and have forgotten. The best poems in A Wilderness of Riches concern Pocahontas, the heroine of the narrative. And she is a fitting heroine, for she speaks for the native Powhatan Indians of the Algonquin tribe, for the land, as well as for the English, and her story sharpens the book’s subtext of marriage, and a woman’s place in the New World.

In the title poem, when John Smith, a buffoon prone to exaggeration (my sentiment, not Lianne’s) describes the coast as “present[ing] itself like a new bride,” Lianne sets the arc to not only retell the stories of the settlement of Jamestown, but also to bring into focus the bluntness and harshness the English afforded their own women.

Hart Crane’s Pocahontas in The Bridge was both the savage woman who tamed English hearts as well as the sexy swelling hills of America. In Lianne’s book, the land isn’t a woman, but could be, for it is virgin land, an image Lianne does not overplay, much to her credit. The settlers and Smith, who are full of lust, are easily baited by laughing women in “Along the Chickahominey River.” Their hunger caused then to “snatch food before sitting down” with the natives in “Encounter 1607.” Their desire for land and riches is only equal to their desire for food and flesh, which Lianne explores in later sections.

While the first section recounts the settlers’ lean times, the bloated riches that Pocahontas encounters after she is stolen away and taken to England undercut the drama in Virginia and balance out the narrative. In “Captive” she wonders, “What chance, have I, another savage to survive?” as she speaks to Old Crone Crow enduring the long voyage to England. She is spoken of as a witch, a lowly woman, a novelty, and as she learns Christianity from my distant not-so-relative Parson Whitaker, he discounts her native religion as it were a tawdry detail in a play debuting across the Thames. He sees her as anything but human.

My favorite moment in her story is in “Vernacular of Night” when she lies next to dull Thomas Rolfe (whom she views in “Before Marriage” as a “strange little man… who can neither hunt…or fashion…trinkets.”) and voices native words for plants and animals as her husband snores and dreams of tobacco. Pocahontas spends much time contemplating her names -- her secret name and her new Christian name -- and it is this understanding of the shades of a name, and therefore of identity, that give the section its heart and brain. It is the same insight that allows her, in “Our Lodgings in London: Two Views,” to understand the irony of staying at the Belle Sauvage Inn, where she witnesses behavior of men who do not go far “without…dagger or drink,” and of women who seek rich men. The folly of English appetites is not shared by her husband, who marvels at the Inn’s locale like a harried businessman in a Comfort Inn close to the convention center. Her understanding of names, the changeling nature of identity, is echoed in “The Jamestown Weed,” and the “Plant Hunter” in section four, where the colonists find that nature’s beauty can be deadly, which makes the naming of things so much more difficult and more sublime than they expect. Of the colonists, only the plant hunter seems at home in the New World, and, like Pocahontas, finds solace in nature.

And Pocahontas remains a lonely figure, lost to both societies, and eventually left coughing in the bitter damp cold of an English winter wishing she were home in the wild gathering tubers in “As I close my eyes against the Cold.” Her loss is our loss, and her loneliness is echoed in the third section of Lianne’s volume, the Brides for the Colony: Voices of the Early Immigrant Women, where the new brides’ individual experience is explored in the loose corona “Brides for the Colony.

The final section of the volume sees slavery find its home in the New World, in the fine poem “Cottonmouth.” How the slaves will be treated is foreshadowed by the violence with which the settlers treat their indentured servants, who speak in this section through Elizabeth Abbot, a woman who didn’t want to do farm work. Who can blame her? Those who spoke out against the government are given a voice through Richard Barnes, who is beaten, tortured and outcast. It is Barnes who compares the wilderness, as well as the colony’s disposition towards freedom, to hell.

Lianne’s book is a fine addition to the history and lore of Jamestown. There is only one poem in the book that reaches out to us through modernity, “The Woman in Grave JR156,” in which archeologists identify the woman’s diet. I wonder what could have been wrought if Lianne allowed more modern voices, or images, to enlarge the narrative and bridge the story of English Imperialism to our country’s struggle for identity in the wake of Iraq and all things Bush. Imagine John Smith as an Elizabethan Dick Cheney blundering his way through the Virginia wilderness looking for an Indian kingdom as rich as any Iraqi oil field. Or the honeybees brought to the colony contrasted with the threat of colony collapse disorder in our time. In any case, A Wilderness of Riches is an earnest and engaging work of reader friendly narrative poetry.

I drove 500 miles to see "The Dark Knight"

2008-08-08T15:28:00.000-07:00

I drove five hundred miles to see The Dark Knight.

No kidding, really.

One of the main objectives of our family vacation to visit relatives and friends in the suburbs of Buffalo was to see the Dark Knight, survive the relatives, weather a class reunion, and pack as much kid friendly play into the week as possible. While we barely made it through the eight days, we managed to drag ourselves to a matinée of The DK and over the course of nearly three hours were run through the paces of an intense summer roller coaster.

Where we live piggybacking movies and other entertainment is second nature, we think nothing of cramming a film between hours of shopping because if we want to see a first run movie we have to trek sixty miles.

There’s no casual movie-going for us, every picture is a calculated experience. Because of this our tolerance for watching drek has decreased, for why drive sixty miles to see a B movie? If we lived in the ‘burbs going to see a B film wouldn’t be such a big deal. It’s there, you’re there. A happy marriage.

But for us a typical movie experience is logistical minefield, are babysitter’s involved, how far away is the picture, how long is it, and finally is it worth the hassle to watch some Hollywood jerk pretend he is Bruce Banner?

No way.

My wife wanted to see the film ASAP, and I must admit I wasn’t nearly as adamant about seeing it as she was, but I ended up enjoying it more.

I’ll skip a formal review, my wife was hoping for more psycho drama and less action (action movies make her glaze over like a supermarket pie) and I was happy just to watch the Two-Face plot unfold. The Joker was true to his roots, slippery, unpredictable and in-love with the Batman. One thing I loved about the film was the simple fact that Bruce Wayne’s apartment and “Bat Cave” were wide open industrial spaces, further centering Batman as an urban hero. Gone was the idea that the caped crusader lurked in the hills beyond town, he was under the city and above it and in the middle of it’s snaky concrete heart whether running complex ballistic tests to lift the Joker’s fingerprint, or seeping up from underneath the city to turn himself in; he is like the city’s vermin, at home in the wasteland of Gotham.

It would be easy for Bruce Wayne to remain the other, running his operation from the safe confines of Wayne Manor. There is something safe about that Batman, something pre-9-11, if you will. Luckily for us Nolan and his writers invaded that space and burned it to the ground in Batman Begins creating the Batman who dwells in the city; a different animal altogether. Not to say that if this Batman were a cave dweller would I have enjoyed the film less, but because the film envisioned a Joker who corrupted everyone by making them conspirators in his exercises in anarchy then it’s especially crucial that Batman be as invested as the citizens are in the city. It’s his home too.

The Dark Knight affirms that summer movies don’t have to be dumb or slapped together, but you probably knew that, I hope the suits are paying attention.