Category: Whole Life of the Poet (Page 1 of 16)

People, Place or Thing: NaPoWriMo 2024 Is Coming

February 23, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This will be my last National Poetry Writing Month Challenge year. I’ve been doing NaPoWriMo for over 10 years now and I said I would stop at 300 poems, which I will hit this year. I wanted the last set to be something more interactive, like an asynchronous group activity. So I’ve come up with a theme on looking back on childhood and putting the past in a very tiny book.

Although I’ll be posting things every day in April related to the theme, I’m not seeing it as a project that has to be finished in a NaPoWriMo amount of time or even in 30 days. The point is to just get through the 30 little challenges. I’m starting to create a calendar to get it all organized.

Materials you will need to complete the challenges:

an iphone camera (if you want to memorialize your little scavenger hunt assemblages ((spoiler alert: there will be scavenger hunt assemblages)),
recipes (see below),
5 books from childhood that you loved, (access to childhood stuff),
5 postcards,
a tiny little notebook. I purchased my tiny little notebook (pictured above) a few years ago at the gift shop of El Rancho de Las Golondrinas, the Hispanic living history museum near Santa Fe. I was just waiting for something to do with it all this time.
Optional: A youtube or streaming music account

Example topics will look something like this:

Childhood Foods

A childhood comfort food
A recipe from childhood you still make
A recipe that breaks your heart
A recipe you associate with your mother, an aunt or mother-figure
A recipe you associate with your father, uncle or father-figure

I’ll document my progress as we go and anyone who follows along (and wants to share) can send pics to and progress to mary@bigbangpoetry.com.

Speaking of NaPoWriMo, on the plane to Cleveland, The Birds and the Bee version of this song below came up on my phone’s music app shuffle. (And I really do love these hipster versions of this song, truth be told.) I remembered driving home from work at AECOM in downtown Los Angeles years ago and Steve Jones on his radio show extolling the virtues of the song’s structure.

I also remembered it was the last outtake of NaPoWriMo 2022 and it got displaced for April 13, 2022, for a Genesis song. Here it is.

Fathoms Deep
(“How Deep Is Your Love,” Bee Gees from the movie Saturday Night Fever)

It’s tempting to pick the proliferating
hipster versions instead of this vulnerable
little embryo of a song
by the original vibrato brothers,
its morass of whispering
away from disco foolhardiness.

Regardless, I feel we must ask
the key, foremost question
posed here in a love trill,
addressed here in plain,
manifest English.

Because I really do need to learn
where this knowledge lives,
where it is, for what it longs.
And this is an inquiry to the heads
of the realms where we are both from.
A question to the pilot, the head honcho,
the chairman of the board, the grand poobah.

How many fathoms deep is it?
And can we believe in it?

Board Game for Poets

January 31, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This amazing world, huh?

In August my friend Ann told me about a poetry board game called Dead Poets Rise, a game that was not yet for sale. I sat across from Ann practically losing my shit. A board game for poets? I’m a poet! I love board games!

I tried and failed to get in on the funding by sending a message to the game Facebook page. Possibly I was too late, but I did get added to the mailing list. The game went on sale last fall for $100. This seems like a steep price when you consider games going for $20-40 on Amazon and Target. But I’ve noticed really popular and well-designed games are going for $100 on eBay, games like The Gallerist (about planning art exhibitions at your gallery and rumored to be the hardest strategy game out there, a factoid told to me by one of the clerks at my local board game hangout) and Shakespeare (where similarly you plan out a theatrical show).

This is a very nice game and I can see why it’s listed at that price point. I got a copy as a Christmas gift. Thanks Mom!

The Stuff

It’s a beautiful game in an awesome hexagonal-shaped box. The only flaw is that the box doesn’t close properly and needs a paper strap that’s hard to get on and off to keep it closed so that the contents don’t all spill out when you try to stash it in your closet. The paper is already tearing and will give up the ghost before long and I’ll have to be careful with storage. Right now the game is not being stored with my other board games but with my conspicuous poetry consumption objects.

The cover also acts as a hexagonal board with quotes printed along the edges. There are also juicy elements like a die, three decks of cards, tons of marbles! And a board that looks like Chinese checkers. Also included are mechanical pencils (with little eraser hats and a box of replacement graphite), pads of paper and a sticky notepad for all your writing prompts.

You also need a phone to look up texts and videos as part of the writing prompts.

The instructions

The instructions attempt to explain in words how to set up the board but we had no idea what we should end up with. The instructions need a picture of the board at the start of play. The main issue was that there were too many marbles for the available marble holes and we needed to have a combination of black and green marbles. But how many black marbles did we need? The instructions didn’t say. And should there be more black marbles in games with more players? There were black and green marbles and big shooting marbles (to represent the players). Shooting marbles went into easily marked holes around the edges of the board. We just had to guess.

Instructions should be specific about how many black marbles to “roll out” per number of players and then instruct the players to fill in the rest of the holes with green marbles. Why were there so many bags of marbles in the first place? There was a nice tan bag full of big beautiful shooter marbles, a beautiful black bag with the game logo full of green marbles. Then there was an extra plastic bag of 12 black marbles and another extra plastic bag containing 4 green and 2 black marbles. We never did figure out what all the different bags meant.

The black and green marbles were referred to as common and uncommon marbles which seemed unnecessary. In fact the game had too much new terminology that was maybe intended to create ambience in the game but it ended up just being confusing.

Instead of getting a specially made single die with low numbers, the instructions had a die translator. This annoyed me more than it did Monsieur Big Bang who was playing the game with me.

A word about Monsieur Big Bang, he hates board games. He grew up with bar games like pool and foosball, not that he’s crazy about those games now either (maybe with the exception of pinball). During Covid I got into board games somewhat excitedly. I focused on finding 1) games I felt deprived of as a child like Mystery Date or Go To the Head of the Class, two games my girlfriends had, 2) detective games with map boards and 3) games with pictures of famous art or art-related games (which is a crossover of #1 and the fact that my eldest brother had the game Masterpiece and refused to play it with me for mysterious reasons so I’ve been obsessing about that game ever since.

A word about me: I am notoriously bad at board games. I just like the doo-dads, setting them up, sorting it all out, losing the game and then putting everything back in the box. Just typing all that out makes me want to do it right now. My eldest brother did play games with me from time to time, but only war games like Risk or Battleship, during which he famously won by lying for the whole game and I guessed every single space until it was impossible not to have hit one of his ships by then. I lost by gullibility but then he was 7 years older than me so…I don’t feel too bad about that.

Getting Monsieur Big Bang to play board games is always a struggle, especially these days because he is very busy. And my local friends have their own games they want to play, so I’m collecting quite a stack of unplayed board games. I even bought one called Plunder with a pirate raiding theme (and little tiny ships with attachable masts and cannons) thinking it would entice Monsieur Big Bang (who also used to like Risk) but that was a no go. One of the last games I made him play was the aforementioned Mystery Date. I had a few friends who had this game but they never wanted to play it (also mysteriously). It has such an awesome opening door feature and I was always wanting to play it.

It turns out my girlfriends didn’t want to play this game because it is mind-bogglingly boring and takes too much time around the board before you can ever get a chance to actually open the technological marvel of that door to reveal your date for the night. I recently snared a copy and talked Monsieur Big Bang into playing it and (can you believe it?) I kept losing this game too! He kept getting the ball-room prince and the ski hunk and I kept getting the ‘dud,’ by which the game just means disheveled guy.

Oh yeah, so another annoying thing about Mystery Date is that is was created in the late 1950s and has seriously outdated ideas as to what makes an attractive date for the typical 1970s little girl. Twenty years later and that ‘dud’ looks pretty much like the most attractive guy in the deck and the others look like the duds.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not very good at board game strategy. And this game would prove no exception, professional-poet expertise aside.

Dead Poets Rise has two stacks of Creation and Chaos cards. You use them to write a poem while your working to collect marbles on the board.

Creation cards give you prompts for lines of your poem. Chaos cards sabotage the directions you were headed with those lines.

Examples of Creation cards: use the words always, never, sometimes in your next line, use alliteration with pr, pl, gr, gl sounds, search Google with provided prompts for words, write about a smell in the room, write about two disparate objects in the room, fill in this sentence when I hear ambulances I want to ….

Monsieur Big Bang said at this point the game felt like a Mad Lib.

Examples of sabotage cards: change one of your words to the opposite, change your verb tense, change the past to the future.

Unfortunately, there were quite a few duplicate cards and some triplicate cards. Coming from a family of poker players who can do fancy acrobatic playing-card shuffling, I can tell you I also suck at card shuffling. So I have to shuffle like ten times and still we couldn’t get them shuffled enough to reduce the duplicates We also caught a typo in the word ‘corresponds’ in one of the cards.

Hopefully these things will get rectified. All the prompts should be original.

We played the short game for two people. The object is to roll the die and move across the board collecting a certain amount of black and green marbles. Once you have all your marbles you can move into the center area of play called The Sphynx Challenge.

Each turn also draws Creation and Chaos cards that help each player create a poem in the style of one of the “dead poets,” obscure poets that comprise another, most interesting deck.

You actually start things off with this dead poet deck, which includes separate little packs containing a handful of cards each for one obscure poet. At the beginning of the game, you all agree on the poet and everyone pulls a poet card with some biography and samples of poems. The players also choose a random theme from a list in the instructions. You use the theme and the poetry samples to write “in the style” of the poet you are attempting to “resurrect.”

It sounds more complicated than it is.

The back of the dead poet packs have biographical information and each player gets one of cards with snippets of their poems on it. These are the cards we drew:

By the time of The Sphynx Challenge at the end, you have pretty much a completed poem and the challenge is to read one line of your “fake” poem lines and two lines of the real poet’s poem and others have to guess which line is yours.

We each guessed each other’s fake lines.

In fact, Monsieur Big Bang won on the technicality that he was the first to make it to the Sphynx area with is big marble. And our decision to have him guess my fake line was just courtesy play.

The punishment for losing the Sphynx challenge seemed too much for the short version of the game (three green marbles) but then again your marbles don’t win you the game so who cares.

The Sphynx challenge introduced the elements of points which seemed sudden and out of place and the game provided no material to track these sudden points (grab a piece of paper). It felt like an after-thought, an additional confusion. And yet those points would determine the winner as people won or lost the challenge. Then again, it was also possible we weren’t playing it right. The whole points layer was confusing.

At the end of the game, we felt like the game was missing something and I couldn’t articulate it. The box had all the do-dads, after all.

Monsieur Big Bang had some ideas though. He said you could almost dispense with the board play and use the card prompts for writing exercises, like for students, friends or just playing alone. He said it was lacking a sense of a game’s highs and lows. There was no real feel of competition. And so we discussed board games that lacked this competition element and yet were still fun, like the Encanto movie board game. In that game you work together against a clock to save the house. It’s still fun but not cut-throat.

My friend Julie recently gave me a very Dungeon and Dragons like haunted house game, Betrayal at House on the Hill, (which I haven’t found anyone to play with yet), and the first half of that game is cooperative to set up the board pieces and the second half of the game, once the monsters get tripped off, is competing against a common monster and against each other.

Dead Poets Rise did feel like a writing exercise more than a game. I also didn’t understand the rationale for collecting the marbles except to extend our writing time with the prompt cards. The game does seem to needs more conflict, if not against each other than with some external element.

Monsieur Big Bang also felt the game didn’t have enough person-to-person contact. And you didn’t feel invested because there wasn’t enough drama, which prompted a retelling of the the joke I learned at Sarah Lawrence, “why are poets (and thus poetry board games) so cut throat? Because the stakes are so low.”

The stakes felt very low for this game. And maybe that’s where game drama lives.

The final imposter challenge did seem most satisfying at the end and maybe that could be worked into regular game play. Considering it was one of the most fun aspects of the game, it was disappointing that the first person to enter the final Sphynx challenge area quickly won the game before anybody else could experience the fun of being an impostor.

I also really liked discovering, if not feeling like I fully “resurrected,” the dead poet. Our poet was Celia Dropkin and our theme was “the war within.” I had never heard of this Russian-born Yiddish poet who immigrated to New York City at the turn of the century (and passed away in the 1950s) so that was great fun for me (more so than for the non-poet-player).

Although there are some fixes needed, I do want to emphasize it’s a fun box of beautiful things and I will be playing it again and showing it to other poets.

My resulting poem turned out like this:

Untitled (the task of adding a title could be added to the play somehow)

Maybe my mother’s yearning
is never in me like conception (Not a bad start)
and the silence of the Gods gone quiet
like all the fires of the world going out,
grounded, groused and groveling for air. (What a mess of a run-on!)
And to survive I strive to organize. (True, dat)
When I hear ambulance I want to
melt into the water like ground (Good prompt to switch those words)
where the italicized roots of Latin are buried. (I had to change roots to monks. Boo.)
And the world revolves on the sight of glass
and dollars and dead poets. (I like the end)

Why Do I Write?

January 27, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Sometimes when I need to find a page quickly on my website and I don’t know where it is I’ll just google it. Like “Mary McCray NaPoWriMo.” It’s faster than browsing around for things. I learned this trick at ICANN because the site has tens of thousands of pages (full transparency, you know).

If I search my name on Bing, that search engine asks me very politely “are you sure you don’t mean porn star Marie McCray?”

If I search my name on Yahoo!, that engine just gives me results for porn star Marie McCray. (“Surely that’s what you want, right?”)

If I search my name on Google (and this is why Google is king, I guess), I get a handy information card to the right that actually returns Me. But Google has decided for some reason that I’m a Journalist. Which is very funny because I’ve never written a piece of professional journalism in my life, unless you count those old reviews on Ape Culture (which had the grand distinction of not being very good).

I can see now that I need to get new pictures. One of the things I dread doing (more on that below).

I have some good friends on the East Coast who I saw last August. They’re a couple: one is a writer/poet and the other is a musician. I’ve known them since back in the Sarah Lawrence days. We’ve had some great conversations over the years about being artists and I remember touring the lair of the musician last summer and the two of us got to musing about why we keep working even though we haven’t “succeeded” and how we would still keep doing it whether we were successful or not. Because we love the doing part and we probably couldn’t stop even if we tried.

I figure feeling this way helps us forego the constant assessments of our value. It’s more about what we value. But this doesn’t make it easy.

It’s tough out there. I know three graphic designers (web and print) who struggle to find work because the Internet has decimated their opportunities, just as it has for writers.

But often I have to remind myself that for poets, it’s been this way for about 100 years already. We were once on top of this culture heap, but then dime-store novels sent us packing; and then motion pictures arrived to soak up everyone’s leisure time. And then TV came. And then the computer games. And then the Internet.

And motion pictures were far from the first disruption to human kind. The printing press put those monks out of business, which was a shame because apparently they were drawing little hidden penises in everything).

Media change is relentless. And we find ourselves in the middle of yet another disruption because annoying human beings keep inventing things like stone tools.

But considering there are still thousands of poets writing and reading poetry even though it’s been 100 years of deeper and deeper losses, we must be working with a different rubric of success. But if you want to join the Irrelevant-Media club, you know where we are. We keep on like dysfunctional little windups.

Alternatively, I know two writers, (one of them lives in my house), who, if there’s no money or promise of money down the line, they do not write. Period.

Another close friend I spoke to recently works in a medium that I would consider mostly a labor of love. And for years they’ve been doing it just because they love doing it, they said. Recently, this changed to working for “something big,” a term that is a vestige of this person’s former life in Show Business.

It’s such a commonly ringing bell lately, I can’t help but think that, despite what anybody says, fame and money are what everybody wants.

Sometimes I even doubt myself. I mean even those monks wanted to be remembered by someone, otherwise they wouldn’t have been drawing all those funny little penises in all those old books.

I’ve been reading an essay about Robert Frost over the last few days, “Robert Frost and Tradition” by Siobhan Phillips.” Phillips says “Frost courted fame on the widest scale and became by some measures the most well-known English-language poet of the twentieth century.”

Frost said, “there is a kind of success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips.”

And esteem buys you no butter, that’s for sure. You can’t argue with that.

I have another visual artist friend I’ve know a very long time, a very talented artist, but this person has what I would call a problem of self-motivation and over the decades hasn’t produced very much. Recently I had dinner with this person and they said apropos of nothing, “I really thought I would be famous by now.” I had some very unfriendly thoughts at that point and then when I got my sea legs again I said, “So how is Becky?”

I mean I have problems of my own but I have some self-awareness about it. For example, I also another friend who gives good advise about networking: go out and hob-knob with other poets (oy!), join poetry groups (no), give readings (good lord!), network through teaching (I’ve seen that and I consider it a Faustian bargain). I didn’t want to do any of that. And that’s on me. I like to think of it as a handshake with mediocrity.

I’m also been reading a poetry anthology sprinkled with rediscovered poets going back to the Colonial era, poets who never published in their lifetimes but are being uncovered even now like hidden treasures. And I think how nice that sounds to me sometimes. You get the fame if not the money and you don’t have to deal with any of the bullshit, like poetry grunts at public poetry readings. (Thank you to Ann who reminded me I sent her that poem many years ago and completely forgot about it.)

But I’ve been thinking more deeply right now about where this ambivalence around success comes from. And like most things, it probably resides in my early childhood experiences, particularly with bullies. I grew up in a place where you would be a target if you won or if you lost. So the safe spot was right in the middle. When I learned what grey rocking was I was like Yes! I am a master of grey rocking. I imagine a little black belt around my little inner grey rock. Literary grey rocking. It’s perfect.

Robert Frost also wrote a great deal about futility, from the futility of building a fence to the futility of conceiving a child (he lost three, arguably four). However, he saw no futility in poetry. He famously said, “every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” And how does one monetize that?

I was writing something the other day and I referenced the game Mousetrap. I played this game with my friends Diana and Lillian when we were kids. We didn’t even bother playing the game. We just set up the mousetrap and set it in motion to see all the ways it wouldn’t work. Due to small manufacturing mistakes, the contraption rarely did work. In fact, it was an exciting miracle if it ever did.

I started writing for reasons that are not all that flattering to me. It was over a boy, of course.

You know that thing you do when you find out somebody you like enjoys some activity or experience and so you try to get into that thing so that you can build a kind of bridge with that person?

I have a bad history of these bad ideas around boys. But in this particular case, through a series of happy and sad Mousetrap-like events, I started writing poems which randomly sent in play a boot kicking a yellow bucket, knocking out a silver rolling ball down a green staircase and through the red slide, knocking the green man off the blue diving board and into the yellow tub which shakes down the red mousetrap. And here I find myself 39 years later having written many hundreds of miraculous poems.

When I first started writing, I firmly believed you had to be a dead poet to be famous poet. (I didn’t know any but dead ones.) And misguided by that belief, I did not stop writing. I just lowered by expectations.

Real, real low.

Of course, there are many very well-known poets, but nobody in my immediate family would be able to tell you the name of a single one.

It’s all relative.

Romanticism idealized both eschewing fame and expecting it. And many of us are stuck there in that perplexing purgatory.

In the forward to Margaret Atwood’s book Negotiating with the Dead, a Writer on Writing she lists two full pages of reasons why writers write including some really funny examples:

To show those bastards
To delight and instruct
Or else I would die!
Because I didn’t want a job
To make myself seem more interesting than I was
To attract the love of a beautiful woman
To rectify a miserable childhood
To serve art
To serve history
To make a name that would survive my death
To experiment
To expose appalling wrongs or atrocities
To give back

There’s plenty more. Later in chapter three, entitled “Dedication,” Atwood talks about the Lewis Hyde book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life and quotes Hyde to say, “any equation that tries to connect literary value and money is juggling apples and oranges.”

Atwood talks about economic exchange versus gift exchange. She says

“the part of any poem or novel that makes it a work of art doesn’t derive it’s value from the realm of market exchange. It comes from the realm of gift, which has altogether different modes of operating. A gift is not weighted and measured, nor can it be bought. It can’t be expected or demanded; rather it is granted, or else not. In theological terms, it is grace, proceeding from the fullness of being.”

She says, “There are four ways of arranging literary worth and money: good books that make money; good books that don’t make money; bad books that make money; bad books that don’t make money.”

So obvious it sounds ridiculous.

According to Hyde, the serious artist would be well advised to acquire an agent who can mediate between the realm of art and the realm of money….he may then remain modestly apart….Lacking such protection, he will have to maintain a very firm division in his own soul.”

Poets are obviously lacking such protection. If you’re a writer of privilege, as I am (I have a safety net or two), this is probably an easier “division of the soul.” Being a poet is a dangerous vocation, being an artist is a a risky vocation if you need that money.

Each of us in on a different path with different needs and opportunities.

Now all this is fully granting how awfully depressing it is when you speak through art and no one responds or responds in the right number of YouTube views or the response is confusing and ambiguous or your efforts don’t move the mountain of the muse itself. I know plenty of artists who tried for a while and then stopped.

And then some mediums of art cost more money than others. Films require big outlays, for example.

But then I think of a lifetime of effort I’ve spent writing many hundreds of poems, paying off a gigantic loan to have been able to go to Sarah Lawrence College (still not done yet).

I’ve never had a fortune in money, but I’ve spent the Imperial Palace in time. And how do you qualify that?

And it was my idea. Am I due a reward for it? Nobody came to me and asked me to do it.

“We really need this poem, Mary.”

I can’t get back this whole life. Nor would I want to. For me my art is like my love. Given freely or it has no value at all. No exchange required.

But then I think fundamentally I’m working under the paradigm of the gift exchange and not the market exchange. Of course I would like to be read, but on a much lesser scale of readership that those who are working under the market exchange.

It’s like throwing parties. My parties are very small. They’re like the parties in the Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant movie Holiday (one of my favorite things ever). I feel like I’m essentially the Mrs. Potter character trying to find that very small party beyond the very big one, the more electric one on the third floor with all the eccentric and funny screwballs: Johnny, Linda, Professor Nick and Ned. Those people seeking “of esteem” over the blinding bling downstairs, the people who make due with imaginary butter on their enchanting parsnips.

Fictions

October 26, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 4 Comments

A few weeks ago I was so proud of myself. I wrote my first short story. Well, that’s not entirely true. I wrote two short stories in college and they were both terrible. One was a humorous ghost story I wrote at Sarah Lawrence and the other was an undergrad story so terrible it had no plot or subject that I can recall.

But anyway, this was a significant milestone in that I’ve been struggling with my fictions since childhood when my friend Krissy and I embarked on our first novels at age 8. Unfortunately, we had no life experiences to cull from and so our epics petered out pretty quick.

In fact, my problem writing fiction goes back to that very young me, back to when I started doing what I call “calibrating towards reality,” in other words obsessively worrying that I am thinking from an unrealistic perspective.

It all started with a tween diagnosis of anorexia, most likely tripped off from a condition called body dysmorphia (although I wouldn’t know what that term was for another decade): an inability to correctly see with my own eyes what was in the mirror in front of me.

And this dutifully led to a distrustful questioning of anything I saw or experienced, basically. Great.

My “calibrations” developed like an over-correction and led to an irritating habit of always asking surrounding people these things: “did that really happen?” or “are you seeing what I’m seeing” and basically disregarding, whole hog, experiences I have alone.

Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans just did a podcast this week about ghosts and I was thinking about whether or not I’ve had any ghostly experiences. And then I remembered I don’t believe the experiences I’ve had because there wasn’t any corroboration. There’s a mental bucket in my head for those experiences: questionable.

This calibrating is also a problem in some social situations. Like someone will be spouting off their fictions and I’ll say, “But that’s not how it happened” or “but that doesn’t make sense because…” or “but what about this other evidence that contradicts everything you’re saying?”

And then I think, “Oh crap, this person is just coping with their fictions right now or this person is just talking in marketing mode.” Leave them to their realities.

But then I think, “Wait a minute, we all have the same reality. There’s no point in the universe where their reality ends and mine begins.”

See? I can’t stop. It’s like a buffering wheel. It’s always going in my brain: “Is that right? What you’re saying?”

This is why I find deep fakes so terrifying. And why I’m hyper-sensitive to gaslighting. Stop trying to fuck up a very fucked-up experience I’m already having over here.

Anyway, here is where these calibrations have a detrimental effect on my attempts to write fiction:

Recently I was in Kansas City and I met up with my grade school friend Jayne from St. Louis. I hadn’t really had a conversation with Jayne since we started Junior High and went into separate social groups. So we had a lot of catching up to do over dinner. And at the end of the night, out in the parking lot as we were saying goodbye, she said something like, “What about that piano teacher we had, huh!” We then told our spouses the gory story and I told Jayne I was trying to write a short story about it but was struggling.

I had just recently come across a photo of this piano teacher and had looked up a newspaper article about the murder she was involved in. Because the story involved a real family, I didn’t want anything I wrote ever getting back to harm the survivors. So I decided to fictionalize everything. Easy enough. I made changes to some of the sexes of the characters, pumped up the sex drama (as you do), added some disguising plot points and boom, I was off to the races.

Except that after a little while I suddenly stopped and said to myself, “But that’s not how it happened.”

“Am I for real right now with this?” I thought. Of course that’s not how it happened. That’s the whole point of changing everything from how it happened, so that it wouldn’t be how it happened!

And so I’ve given up on that story for a while.

Telling stories doesn’t seem to be a problem for me if they’re based on reality and I’m depicting an ostensible reality, even if my memory fails me or I need to embellish for the sake of humor or someone’s privacy or, as my great-grandfather would say, to make it better than it was. Those kind of detours feel acceptable because I know the difference in my head. The core reality is clear and stories aren’t obligated.

I’ve also written two books of narrative poems and I’ve been trying to figure out what the difference is there. Why was I able to do that? My Mars poems aren’t a fully realized narrative, but instead little narratives tossed in among personal lyric poems. I was still figuring out how to write narrative poems back then and could only carry a story for the length of a poem. That seemed do-able.

The next book of cowboy poems was actually a fully-drawn out, start-to-finish plotted story. It took forever but again, living in those stories was accomplished poem by poem. I always thought I could transfer that trick to short stories or a novel.

But it’s not the same. Like at all. Those genres demand you be more immersive in their fictions. And that is not a very comfortable place for me to be.

There’s a common prescription in fiction to base characters on people you know, à la Proust. As part of a fiction exercise in a fiction writing guide, I tried to make my novel characters an amalgamation of poets and people I knew. And the result was the same exact mess. My brain kept wanting to default to one real person or another. “But so-in-so wouldn’t do that.”

The new short story had the benefit of being the product of a funny dream. I was able to basically transcribe the dream, clean it up and embellish it where needed. It was subconsciously delivered almost intact and that make all the difference.

I’m thinking the problem comes with stories based on even a semblance of a true story but are not true stories, per se. And I’m leaning toward the idea that I’m to be a Donald Barthelme kind of fiction writer, veering heavily toward nonsense. Because I’m not haunted by the idea of discovering folderol, the uncanny or ghostly things.

I’m haunted by the specter of reality.

Happy Halloween!

The Labor Poets

September 15, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

After my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away, my grandfather came to live with us for a while in St. Louis. And when my grandfather found out I was writing poems, (I was in college at the time), he told me to read the labor poets.

I had no idea who these labor poets were. They certainly weren’t in the Norton Anthology I had from school.

My grandfather said I should look them up at the Public Library. He told me to go to the reference desk and say, “Show me the labor poets!”

I wasn’t about to do this for two reasons: for one I was too shy to demand anything from reference librarians, (ok, not entirely true if it was an old Cher magazine I wanted from an archive), but also I wasn’t reading any other poets at the time. I was just a newb writing to find my own voice.

I should take a moment here to elaborate about my grandfather. I usually talk about my grandparents on my father’s side because their history is very mythological and romantic. But my grandparents on my mother’s side are none the less interesting (or mythological for that matter).

Some would call my grandfather an anglophile.

Now I live with a Francophile. So I know what this is. Monsieur Big Bang’s high-school friends still lament about trying to have a conversation with him back in the 1980s. Listening to him was like, “France, France, France, Proust. France, France, France, Proust.”

Monsieur Big Bang himself will tell you he was very much like the Italian-obsessed kid in the movie Breaking Away, a working-class kid enamored with another romantic culture. And just like that kid in the movie who had his own reality-check during the bike-race scene when the Italians cruelly sabotaged his bike, Monsieur Big Bang spent a good deal of time in France finding out the French are assholes too, just like everybody else.

But I don’t feel anglophile is quite the right word for what my grandfather was. Somehow the word anglophile suggests a range in an obsession. And as I’ve mentioned in my other blog, my grandfather had only a small set of topics he would discuss at any time:

What English people ate or did not eat. This suspiciously coincided exactly with what my grandfather ate and did not eat, like tomatoes. He said an Englishman would never eat a tomato. (We’ll come back to that.)
The superiority of British shipping history. I spent many, many hours with this man and I only had to hear the words “Sir Frances” or “Sir Walter” and I would gently float off to my happy place, which in college was thinking all the time about boys.
America was a completely corrupt country and soon our hard-fought-for unions would be weakened and demolished. This was in the 1980s during Reaganomics. Looking back today, I can see he was right about this, but at the time it really rankled me and my mother to hear it.
The last thing was The Ludlow Massacre. I heard about this tragedy all the time. “Remember The Ludlow Massacre.” It was his Alamo. When I happened to come upon a highway sign for the massacre site in Southern Colorado about ten years ago, I turned off immediately to visit the place (every American should). I had heard about it so many times in my childhood, the actual location always seemed more fantastical to me than real. It was like coming upon the exit sign to Narnia.

These topics all come together for my grandfather in his family’s Colorado pioneer history. Although my grandfather spent only a total of two weeks in the country of England during his entire lifetime (see below), his adored parents were both from Cornwall, both from coal mining families who immigrated separately to America, and both his mother and father were heavily invested in the American labor movement as it was happening at turn-of-the-century coal sites in Colorado.

My grandfather could determine a stranger’s political party in five minutes. And he could be incredibly difficult if he didn’t like you (say you belonged to the wrong one). He could also exhaust people with his small list of discussion topics.

In fact, my grandfather talked about England so much that when my grandmother, (a Germanic woman from a big family farm in Iowa), was offered a two-week trip to England during the family’s roots tour of 1977, she declined. She opted instead to “take care of Dave and the kids in Missouri.”

She chose Missouri over England! (I can’t even.)

She said she felt like she had already been there.

After my mother, Aunt Merle and grandfather returned from that same trip, my mother told me, “Mary I saw tomatoes everywhere.” I was like how would we know? How would we even know?

My grandfather talked about England so much that I benefited in being the remaining person he took to dinner every Thursday night for years when everyone else in his life had dropped out. (Dropped out of the restaurant dinners, anyway. My mother still cooked him a big dinner every Sunday.) He insisted on eating at more expensive establishments after working until he was 80 as a machinist and a mechanic. He had a good social security check and had been frugal most of his life and he wanted to eat well. He usually wanted to visit the same fine establishments over and over, too, which also tired everyone out. I was the last man standing and his driver except for those times he wanted us to splurge with a cab.

I once took him to The St. Louis Bread Company, (a direct relative of Panera), so I could show him this fabulous new thing called a bread bowl. He was offended that I had to “truck our own food” to the table and refused to be impressed.

“But soup! In a bowl of bread!”

So we were back to the fancy Bristols and Spiros soon enough. I missed most of the Seinfeld, Mad About You and Cosby Show episodes during those Thursday-night years. It’s a gapping hole in my cultural literacy.

Anyway, all these years later I have discovered Cary Nelson who has recently created a critical space in the American poetry canon to rediscover these labor poets my grandfather was telling me about. Revolutionary Memory is a book about how these poets were lost from anthologies in the first place. Next Nelson edited two major anthologies which reinstated these lost poets, Anthology of Modern American Poetry and Anthology of Contemporary Poetry.

As I’m finding these labor poets in those anthologies, I’m deciding I really like them and I’ve been tracking down books of their collected works (if available; they’re still pretty obscure). These poets are all very funny and they don’t write about politics or labor issues all the time. But when they do, it’s poignant and crafted. Some of my favorite poets so far:

Kenneth Fairing, who also wrote a respectable crime noir book called The Big Clock
Thomas McGrath
Stanley Burnshaw

What you tend to want from your dead relatives is context. And back when my grandfather was alive I was too young and badly-read to even know what questions to ask him. Did he read these poets himself? Where did he come upon them? Did he ever subscribe to the socialist periodical New Masses or The Masses where many of these poets were published? (My mother tells me just now that he did take a Labor newspaper). Did these poets come up in conversation at union halls or in machine shops? I have my grandfather’s scrapbook of union and political clippings and there’s not a single poem in it as I can recall. Did he collect any of these poems somewhere else?

One final story. I was living in Yonkers and my grandfather would very kindly send me fresh canned tuna from Winchester Bay in Oregon in cases of 24. About every six months when I ran out, he would send me more. I’ve never tasted a better canned tuna than the fresh tuna from Winchester Bay, Oregon. My grandfather and I weren’t able to dine out together anymore because I was at Sarah Lawrence in New York by then and he had moved back to the coast of Oregon.

We still kept our standing date every Thursday night, if just on the phone. One time it took over two weeks for his box of tuna cans to arrive and he was really angry at the Post Office. During one of our Thursday night calls he said, “the Pony Express could have delivered it faster!” I took his point but truthfully, the Pony Express would have taken months and probably Indians would have been enjoying the cans of tuna instead of me. He then said very seriously, “You know in England they send all their mail through pneumatic tubes.”

I thought this was just about the silliest thing he had ever said. And in the years following I told this story of the tuna to many, many people as an example of the kinds of unbelievable things my grandfather would say about England.

Fast forward years later I’m in Paris with Monsieur Big Bang and we’re visiting some museum there, (the sewers? the catacombs? the city museum?), and they start talking about how Paris was once fitted with pneumatic tubes everywhere for quickly sending around mail throughout the city. I turned to M.B.B and said, “Oh shit. He was right about pneumatic tubes in England!”

Goodwill

September 11, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Goodwill. I’m not talking about a thrift score here.

I’m talking about the person-to-person kind. You know, bonhomie.

I’ve been around tribes of writers for many, many years now and other artists for a time too. I’ve always dreamed of finding my tribe, my school, my group of likeminded thinkers…and mostly for the social aspect if I’m being honest about the fantasy. When I read stories about professors holding court at restaurants or drinking establishments surrounded by their students talking shop, talking about quality writers and writing, I always think mmm….that sounds so nice.

I do have friends that I collaborate with and friends who are writers, but I’ve never found that sympatico group of people who are working on the same things I’m working on. And as for the work itself, some writers enjoy the process (I know I do) and some writers find it difficult and painful. But aside from any enjoyment you might get just by doing it (brainstorming, assembling, editing, polishing), I contend writing isn’t really about the written result per se. It’s about communicating to other people, which is more social than solitary.

And the harder the thing is to communicate, the more words become a problem. Words and sentences don’t always convey. They manipulate everyone all the time. Words say things you don’t intend. They stick your foot in it.

But you keep going, because what else is there but speaking and writing?

Once you’re dead, the written words will be left behind like an empty vessel. Others might enjoy them but that’s none of your concern anymore. The writing may live or not live. You most definitely will not live.

So if you were the last man on earth, would you bother? Once the people you’re communicating with are gone, would you bother? No, I don’t think it’s the writing itself, deep down, that fulfills what we desire.

As Al Pacino says in Author! Author!, “We’re people, Gloria! We’re people!” People who need people.

One of my biggest pet peeves lately is the envy writers and artists feel toward one another, especially friend-to-friend envy.

This is exhibited in many ways: friends consistently not reading or attending to their friends artworks, friends not providing words of encouragement when milestones are reached (like publications or good reviews), friends being inexplicably suddenly attentive when bad milestones are hit (failures, bad reviews). “Sorry to hear about your bad review. You must feel terrible.” It’s easy to say a real friend wouldn’t do that, but sometimes otherwise-very-good friends do things like this.

And full disclosure I used to be one of those people. Not the schadenfreude kind, but I did find it hard to drum up genuine enthusiasm for a friend or acquaintance’s success. And I think it’s a naturally competitive emotional response to be envious.

I think it serves you not a whit, but it’s a natural, normal response.

When I started this blog, I made a conscious effort to approach other people’s poetry pieces with an open and impartial mind. My friend Christopher was a good mentor in this. No matter how he may have historically and dramatically disliked something, (recently he declared to me on the phone, “no woman can pull of bangs!”), he will approach a new thing with an open mind, lacking any of his prior prejudices. He will say things like “I usually don’t like this but you have to give so-and-so credit. That was amazing. They really did that well.” It’s always a generous, fair-minded response.

It was in that spirit that I tried to dump my own prejudices and walk forward in literature without the baggage of envy. And this was initially a challenge when reading the work of someone I knew. In the back of my chest there was that pang of envy every time. Why didn’t I do this? I could do this. My friend is moving forward and I’m falling behind. The crazy thing is I didn’t usually care about falling behind. I’ve been behind from the get-go; I’m usually the dumbest person in the room and I’m comfortable with this.

But envy is a feeling your ego creates, something deep-seated. And your ego has its own agenda.

The thing is there is a trick to escaping this. I actually learned it from a therapist I had many years ago, the same one I quit over the Linda Ronstadt song. Although she gave me the terrible advise to consider ‘no good’ any boy who was disinterested in me (which was certainly not healthy or logical), she also gave me a piece of very good advice that changed my then-young life.

I was a senior in high school at the time and she told me to keep a daily list of everything good that happened to me and another list of everything bad that happened. She insisted that over time the bad list would become shorter and the good list would become longer, like magic.

And it worked. (In reality, it was a trick of attention and where you put it.)

Turns out, in the the case of envy, the fake-it-til-you-make-it method does, in fact, work. First you drum up some half-baked enthusiasm for your successful friend and it’s like endorphins kick in or something. It feels good to be happy for someone. Before you know it, you’re feeling real genuine enthusiasm for them and their projects. Magic!

You’ll soon notice envy fading away completely and you’re a much happier creative person in the world.

This is different than toxic positivity. Negative emotions are normal. And there’s plenty time to still feel shitty about strangers and their successes. Just don’t let yourself feel envy over your friends.

But then sometimes I wonder if maybe all friends aren’t created equal. Maybe good artist friends aren’t good generic friends. Cézanne was frustrated with Zola and Zola was frustrated with Cézanne. Maybe the friend who would bail you out of jail isn’t the same kind of friend who will happily deconstruct your latest opus.

I have to say, my best readers have been complete strangers. Hell, I think my only readers have been complete strangers, aside from my mother. (Thanks Mom!)

But the thing is some of those stranger readers have gone on to become very good friends. And we talk about more than writing or Cher. We talk about our struggles in life as well.

So I don’t know the answer to this yet but I think the world has become so hyper-competitive and self-serving and hyper-sensitive as to our own standing, we’ve lost too much goodwill. And trust me, goodwill feels so much more pleasant than envy.

🤗

And So the Summer Departs

September 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

To-do List Courtesy of Reddit

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here…well since our Essay Project came to a close in July. When I finish a big project I always feel suddenly a little untethered.

Alarmingly, this year has gone by faster than any year before (it would seem). Cruel summer and turned into cruel fall. Soon it will be Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The Halloween stores are already open and just a moment ago it was spring and I was finishing up migrating websites. The whole year was on the horizon and my day job was really feeling great. (They gave us ice cream!)

The year of 2023 has brought me….well, things. For one, the day job has turned into the gaslit labors of Sisyphus. And the somewhat dreadful news about Artificial Intelligence has taken a lot of wind from the sails of my proliferating digital poems.

I spent a few minutes yesterday with no small bit of ennui considering if I’ve actually accomplished anything this year.

But I have.

I’ve finished two multi-year online blogging projects on Cher Scholar and we’ve wrapped up the Essay Project here. I did create a few new browser-based poems and the The Electrical Dictionary of Melancholy Absolutes hit 100 definitions quite unbelievably this week.

And the in-progress stuff continues to march along. Although it’s been a slow slog, I’ve been working on a big course-like survey about the poems of American history. I stared about two years ago and I’m just now seeing the finish line. Monsieur Big Bang’s new Intro to Anthro podcast has me thinking about what format that survey course will take. Should it be a podcast or an online class? Should I use an educational platform for a fee or just host it myself for free (like a podcast)? I still don’t know. Podcasts have higher visibility but that format leaves out the possibility of fun PowerPoints and videos of petroglyph from my neighborhood. In any case, that’s a decision probably a year or two away.

The Katharine Hepburn poem is underway and slowing forming into itself. I’ve also started a new browser-based poem about my paternal grandfather based on some work my brother Randy finished a few years ago researching the history of our grandparents in Jicarilla, San Carlos, Hopi, Tohono Oʼodham, at the Indian School at Stewart, Nevada, and their final years in Roy, New Mexico.

I also need to dust off the Braille machine I purchased a few years ago and figure out how to write poems on that thing.

I have a little stack of experimental poetry books to review going back to last fall of 2022.

There are some fun trips ahead, too. Our group formerly known as the Sarah Lawrence writing group, now known as the Difficult Book Club, held a reunion dinner recently in New York City. It was so much fun, we’ve made plans to meet again in Winslow early next year.

And I have poems forthcoming in a spring 2024 anthology of Albuquerque poets coming out from University of New Mexico Press.

It’s a lot of work. I’ve made a big change in my day job hours that will go into effect at the first of the new year and hopefully that will give me more time finish all of this stuff. There’s that novel too.

So I guess that’s good, right? I feel like I’ve hit a plateau somehow. Oy. These are times for baby steps.

Anyway, in other news my friend Christopher gave me this book for my birthday, a coloring book created by Jane Heyes, peppered with Shakespearean, Romantic and 20th Century British poetry (except for one Walt Whitman poem floating in there, “A Glimpse“).

Maybe I should spend a few months just coloring around poems like I’m William Blake

Meditations on Milestones

June 26, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 1 Comment

Three stories:

One: a project that took so long, everything changed

I was very excited Sunday when I suddenly hit a major milestone with my Katharine Hepburn epic. I finished sorting through all my notes. Woohoo!

Okay, this may not seem like a big deal, but I took my first note while sitting on the floor of my living room in my Yonkers apartment 25 years ago.

It was a basement apartment steps away from a beautiful aqueduct trail running up the Hudson River near Odell and Warburton. I used to walk my dog there twice a day. The apartment was always freezing (and flooding) and everyone else was on rent strike…except me because nobody bothered to tell the new tenants about it.

I would gladly have joined the strike just to be able to phone my grandfather in Oregon to tell him I was finally on strike for something, at least something other than that time he talked me into going on strike in their Port Orford living room the day I was disgruntled about having to eat fish again for dinner. He even helped me make a picket sign and sent me pacing around the room with it.

Of course, he would have asked about the picket lines and I would have said, “There’s no line, Grandpa. I’m just not paying my rent! Kickin’ ass for the working class!”

Anyway, aside from reading the occasional new Katharine Hepburn biography, it wasn’t until this year that I made a concerted effort to compile all the notes from all the books, magazines and journals. And it kind of feels like 25 years, (on and off, but mostly off), digging into a basement and now I can start pouring the foundation and raising the walls.

But here’s the thing, a lot has changed for women in 25 years. And I am finding that assumptions I made about Katharine Hepburn back then, assumptions I was pretty sure most other women shared as well, they aren’t so certain anymore.

For example, Katharine Hepburn herself, both her parents and her Aunt Edith together worked for and symbolized sexual, economic and reproductive freedom for women. You don’t have to search very far on social media to find men (and women) fighting against those very ideals Hepburn stood for and defended. Conservatives are attacking reproductive freedom on many fronts, not just abortion. Contraception, control over one’s virginity or sexuality, and the entirety of women’s roles in the workplace are now contested spaces. I saw a tweet yesterday attacking a woman’s decision not to procreate at all, even through abstinence.

So I can no longer tell the story I was going to tell in the same way I was going to tell it, with the assumptions I was going to make about how women are allowed to be. The direct quotes I had been cataloging from Hepburn and her allies, quotes which still sound empowered and fearless aren’t going to land the same way for everyone. Even the assumption that an empowered woman is a positive thing is now up for debate again. I can’t even assume Katharine Hepburn can be understood as a great American hero in today’s political climate.

Two: hypertext heroics

I also finished a new browser piece, a more complicated piece using those iframes we once implemented back in the late 1990s with all those boxes and ugly scroll bars everywhere.

And usually, when I try to return to these older HTML design elements, I introduce a whole host of problems for myself and have to find work-arounds and make compromises. For example, in this piece I had wanted to use the new search technology Text Fragments. You’ve seen this in action if you’ve ever searched for something and were directed to a webpage with the exact search text highlighted. My grand vision was to show highlighted text from one frame link to another frame’s text. But Text Fragments won’t work at all with iframes so I had to scrap that architectural pipe dream.

I was telling a relative in Kansas City recently about writing browser poems and how I was going about them. And she said, “So you’re trying to make them hard to read?” And I said, “Yes.”

Because it’s hard to read on browsers. It’s frustrating on many levels. That’s what makes a book so pleasant…to this day. And pages and poems don’t get lost in a book. They don’t suddenly stop working. On the other hand, books are relatively passive. Links make you do something. Even something as microscopic as clicking a mouse button. Browsers and books, they each have their capabilities and failures.

Three, the notebook

A few weeks ago I started to use a handmade notebook I’ve been saving for a special purpose. I purchased it about 10 years ago but whenever I need a new notebook, I always go for the dollar-store ones first.

I finally decided on a use for this best notebook collecting favorite poem titles from poems I find on Twitter. And since I am reminded of the day I purchased the notebook each time I use it, I’ve been thinking about the people I met that day and looking up their names on Wikipedia. This weekend I discovered two of them have died. (Sigh.)

Nonetheless, this is an amusing story about meeting somewhat-famous people and how it doesn’t always go so well.

When we first moved to New Mexico in 2010 we lived in Santa Fe. I was working for ICANN in Los Angeles but working from home in Santa Fe. So I wasn’t meeting any new friends. This is partly because Santa Fe has become a wealthy and cliquish city. But also, I just wasn’t getting out. I met my friend Maryanne on a bus tour to see Greer Garson’s historic John Gaw Meem house on the Pecos River. For years, she was the only friend I had in Santa Fe.

I was even attempting to glom on to Monsieur Big Bang’s friends from Highlands University and the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. Well, I only did this once but I befriended one of his anthropology professors, a woman from Israel living in New Mexico to study Navajo culture. She was a cancer survivor and involved in a Santa Fe charity whereby seriously rich people were raising money to help poor, rural New Mexico cancer patients afford the stupidly expensive Santa Fe motels when they came in town for treatments.

So I would invite the Professor to dinner and she would invite me to these charity art shows and events in Santa Fe, One day the two of us traveled to the small New-Mexican town of Galisteo for the town’s home studio art tour. Because it’s always fun to go house to house and see everybody’s studio set up, especially in rural towns with especially high concentrations of artists.

Galisteo is interesting in itself. All I ever knew about it was that Burl Ives lived there. If you drive through the town, it appears to be just another shady ancient and rundown New Mexican village. But shockingly those dilapidated-looking adobes are actually multi-million-dollar retirement homes. I remember the Professor telling me the CEO of Victoria’s Secret lived in one of them! How did those people even find out about Galisteo? And is it fair for a bunch of rich people to buy up a quaint little New Mexican village?

Anyway, so we went from swanky shack to swanky shack looking at everyone’s art spreads and we finished up at a house on a hill, my Professor’s friend from the cancer charity, a French woman named Evelyn Franceschi. She was a strikingly beautiful woman who had an attic full of delightfully charming French-looking things she had made by hand: books, dolls, pictures. She even made her own French chocolates. (I bought some.) She was also quirky and charming and I bought the aforementioned notebook from her and loved it so much I hated to use it for ten years.

While we were there, another friend rode up on a motorcycle. We all stood in the dark, adobe living room chatting. Evelyne found out from the Professor that Monsieur Big Bang was working on an anthropology degree and Evelyne told me we should come back sometime to see petroglyphs on a mesa bordering their property (we never did). When the Professor told Evelyne I was a writer, she told me her husband was a writer, too, and had just written a book of local Galisteo history. I was very interested in reading about Galisteo that she told me I should ask her husband about it when he came back. As if on cue, her husband arrived minutes later. I went up to him and said, “Evelyne tells me you’re a writer. What sort of things do you write?”

I was expecting him to show me his stack of book copies on Galisteo history. But with a stone face he said, “I write plays.”

And I said, “Oh.”

I remember the sound of disappointment in my voice and I could even feel my face crumple up a bit at this unfortunate news. I mean plays are nice but how often do you meet a Galisteo historian?

And so that was the conversation killer. He looked at me with the face of someone who is annoyed that you do not know who he is, but not annoyed enough for him to tell you. We each went our separate ways and I never did learn the history of Galisteo.

The Professor and I took our leave and as we were walking to her car, her motorcycle friend comes up behind us. As she’s putting on her helmet she says to me, “You know who that was, don’t you?”

And I hate it when people say that because they know very well you don’t know who that was. But anyway I said, “No. Who?”

“He wrote The Elephant Man.”

“Oh…wow,” I said. “That is impressive.”

She told us he moved to Galisteo in order to not be found. His name was Bernard Pomerance and he died in 2017 of cancer. Evelynn died in 2015, about two years after we all met in her house in Galisteo. All things considered, I’m very happy to have this souvenir of my social awkwardness, this lovely notebook handmade by the charming Evelyn Franceschi, wife of the playwright who wrote The Elephant Man and possibly other bits of Galisteo history.

The Museum of Didion

June 20, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I used to work with Natalie years ago at a company called Agribuys in Torrance, California. We’ve stayed friends and she came to visit last fall. While we were standing in the outdoor car of the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad train in Northern New Mexico, she said the Joan Didion exhibit, (“Joan Didion, What She Means“), had finally opened at the Hammer Museum in LA. What? I completely lost track of that. And I had only two months left to see it!

Which I did finally in January with Julie (Natalie lives in the San Francisco Bay area) and we went right after my plane landed (and after a quick breakfast at the old stalwart Dinah’s). That’s how excited I was to make it the first thing in an event-packed weekend. It was raining the whole weekend, which drove people to do things they normally didn’t, like see museum exhibits and the Didion crowd was so big they had to break us up into two tours, one to start at the beginning of the exhibit and one to start and the end (our group).

After the first ten minutes of our guide drawing out visitor insights from two Anne Truitt and Martin Puryear abstracts (with questions like what does this say to you? And you? And you?) and nary a mention of Didion herself or what Hilton Als might have been thinking when adding the abstracts here, Julie and I peeled off to make our own way through the show.

And to be honest we kind of flitted through the five or six rooms because by this time we were tired and exasperated with the rain and the excitement of me being back in LA after a few Covid years. We focused mainly on the personal items and pop culture subjects, which generally happens with Julie and I are together and thinking with the same brain. I knew I’d need the book to make sense of how the original art pieces selected by Hilton Als all fit together in the Joan Didion story.

The exhibit was the brainchild of writer Hilton Als. In his essay he said he tends to like writers who are mental frontiersmen, writers who equivocate sometimes and writers who aren’t afraid to have second thoughts. Me too and I think that’s why I also like Lester Bangs (although he works in a much messier, wild west way). To see somebody change their mind is a very impressive thing.

And this wasn’t simply an exhibit of Joan Didion’s life, or her ideas or all the writings. It was an exhibit of how her experiences can intersect with the images and sculptures of other artists, artists who are thinking about the same dilemas or covering eras she had also lived in and wrote about.

Als talks about her flat tone, her family myths of self-reliance and pragmatism, the whole mythology of her ancestry of California frontiersman. She tired to “carry that on” in the vein of “seeds got carried.” But she later found those ideals were “recklessly self-inventing.” So important in my connection to Joan Didion. How our family histories try (and sometimes fail) to propel us. Als talks about her emotional detachment, her family idea that the future was a space (the West), a territory, a freedom, and yet how frontiers are susceptible, Didion came to feel, to kinds of “crackpot theories.” This is a concrete example of Manifest Destiny as a crackpot theory.

Als talks about her efforts in turning over the wounds of losing her daughter and husband prematurely, how astute she was about loss but how her attempts were ultimately failures to “understand what could not be understood.” He talks about Didion’s idea of how writers “look for stories that describe the self to the self.” But also how Didion was different in that she could find herself in other peoples’ stories, people who were very different from her. I always found this impressive, too. As humans, we don’t tend to do that.

Didion didn’t believe all the things she had written “add[ed] up” and she distrusted narrative resolutions, conclusions, wrap-ups, morals or even structural outlines.

Als talks about the great Didion gaze, her way of noticing, (I think in a very removed but emotional way), how she used her whiteness and frailness to expose lies and “the fakery involved” in not just Hollywood, an underbelly of which she was intimately familiar with, but also the great showbiz of politics, which she spent that later part of her career exploring.

Her tentative feminism: “Woman still rarely allow themselves the right to look at and talk about anything, let alone themselves…nice ladies turn away. They do no look but are looked at.” Such an awesome observation right there.

The exhibit’s commemorative book includes sections that depict each separate room of the show (in chronological eras of her life), all the gathered art pieces interspersed with brief biographies and an indicative essay from that era.

The first room was called Holy Water (covering the years of 1934-56) and it dealt mainly with the holiness of our early places, in Didon’s case the Sacramento area where she grew up.

The art pieces for this era were primarily about water, fluidity and movement. They included Wayne Thiebaud’s arial oil panting of farmlands, an Alma Ruth Lavenson photo of the northern CA landscape with a juniper, Chiura Obata’s woodblock print of a river mountain landscape and a Marven Hassinger sculpture which was basically a long chain and rope meant to symbolize a river. There was a video excerpt from John Wayne scene in Stagecoach (because Didion loved John Wayne), family memorabilia, handmade maps of Sacramento, embroidery art and quotations about female creativity.

The next room, Goodbye To All That (1956-1963), depicted Didion’s time after leaving Sacramento for an opportunity to write fashion copy for Vogue Magazine in New York City, winning the same Prix de Paris award Sylvia Plath did years earlier (as fictionalized in The Bell Jar). Didion always claimed her writing style was “fashioned” here writing copy for Vogue and the occasional movie reviews, personal essays. It was during this time she met and married writer John Dunne (1964).

This room showed the upper-middle-class and society paintings of John Koch (depicting her own upbringing), Edward Hoppers’ “Office in a Small City,” the Todd Webb photo of Georgia O’Keeffe standing in her garage in front of her “Above the Clouds” painting, some Diane Arbus movie-themed photographs, the Vogue covers which had Didion pieces in them and her Prix de Paris Vogue announcement itself. One of the best juxtapositions was a Diane Arbus photograph of black transvestites next to a Richard Avedon photo of the Daughters of the Revolution. Both subjects had deadpan stares for the camera.

This section in the book ends with a good Didion essay from 1969 from Life Magazine, “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths.”

The next room, The White Album (1964-1988), covers probably her peak period, when she wrote her most memorable and groundbreaking essay collections, novels and essays, and when she also started writing screenplays with John Dunne (A Panic in Needle Park, A Star is Born) because she said she didn’t want to teach. She also became a parent in this decade. She famously said during this time,

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Didion was starting to think about how writer’s think.

The art pieces include a sketch of Didion by Don Bachardy, a video clip playing from the movie of her book, Play it As It Lays showing Tuesday Weld driving around LA freeways. There are documentary photos of the unrest at the time, personal photos with Sharon Tate by Jay Sebring, the abstract Anne Truitt acrylic and, Martin Puryear etching and charcoal that sent us running from the tour, Noah Purifoy’s sculpture about the Watts Riots, Ed Ruscha’s photos of Santa Monica Boulevard and his fold-out lithograph of every building on the Sunset Strip, Jack Pierson’s set up of a record player on a table, Didion and Dunne’s screenplay movie posters, Los Angeles neighborhood photos by Henry Wessel, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, Robert Bechtle’s reproduction painting of a yellow Pinto in a driveway and photos of the Blank Panthers and Hells Angels which Didion wrote about. There are also Vogue photos of the interior of Didion’s Malibu house.

Her 1975 essay “Planting a Tree is Not a Way of Life” ends the section and is an almost perfect essay on the self-deception of the writer. It was a commencement speech delivered for the University of California-Riverside. “We all struggle to see what’s going on…that’s the human condition.”

The final room was called Sentimental Journeys (1988-2021) and it included later-day Juergen Teller photos of Didion, Doninique Nabakov’s areal photo entitled “Jogger in the Park,“ Cuban artists Ana Mendieta’s areal photographs of blood in the surf, works of other Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Salvadorian artists Ronald Moran and Walterio Iraheta (interesting photographs of worn Salvadorian shoes).

The last essay was “The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic” about the creation of the Broadway stage production of The Year of Magical Thinking.

I actually get a lot out of these artist mash-up exhibits, making connections between different types of artists and thinkers, looking for conversations in art pieces. It reminds me of one of my favorite books produced for an exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It was called Shared Intelligence, American Painting and the Photograph and it showed how the early modernist photographers and painters were conversing with each other through their work.

It looks like the next stop in my Joan Didion obsession is going to be the New York Public Library once they finally acquire and process all of Didion and Dunne’s personal papers. Can’t wait.

AI Aiyee!

June 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve been telling people this week about what a dumpster fire my life is at the moment what with various things going awry, (job things, neighborhood things, sick friends, old dogs, and many, many more).

For example, I wanted long hair when I was young and my mother would not allow it, mostly based on her own aggravating childhood experiences of her mother brushing her long hair while she practiced piano but also because she said she knew me very well and I would never brush it. And if I didn’t brush it, spiders would nest in it. That’s what she said.

I thought, hmmm…not a deal breaker.

So what happens this morning? Ok, she was right. I don’t brush my hair very often, but seriously? I suppose you could say this is a dumpster fire of my own making but that’s not the point. The point is, that spider could have picked any other week to go for my long, unbrushed hair.

So anywho, I’ll be using a few dumpster fire pics to describe the new normal for poets and other writers in the shadow of Artificial Intelligence, another dumpster, another fire.

Everyone everywhere is talking about Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and the astounding (and creatively off-putting) gains it has made in the last few months with the release of ChatGPT.

When I was last in LA in April, my friends and I went to the Marina del Rey restaurant Dear Jane’s and our friendly waiter there, (who had just moved to LA from Atlanta), told us he was using ChatGPT to write a script for a sitcom about a restaurant where he was once employed. He said he just plugged in all the characters and some scenarios and bada-bing-bada-boom! The script was done.

Forget for a moment the cliché that every waiter in LA is writing a Hollywood script. We have more pressing problems.

I also have a friend from Sarah Lawrence who now works as an editor at a very prominent magazine in New York City. She told us the writers there are being told they have to use ChatGPT for first drafts (save us all time, you know). The writers there are very unhappy about it. Even the young digital natives are upset. Everyone can see the writing on the wall here.

For years, we’ve been letting AI learn from us everywhere from Grammerly to auto-correct to auto-suggest. And we’re so cheap and frugal. We’ll happily be lab rats as long as the App is free. As they once said in the documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” if you didn’t pay for the product, the product is you.

So here we are. Flood under the bridge.

I’ve been saying for years writers shouldn’t feel so threatened by AI since nobody wants to hear what machines have to say. We’re human beings wanting to connect with other human beings about the human being experience. I was even reminded of this while attending my niece’s graduation from Perdue in Indiana last month. We talked about AI there too. At dinner when someone suggested the commencement speeches might someday be written by AI, everyone noticeably cringed.

The table was full of engineers who had plenty to say about AI. First the engineers informed us it was really machine learning we’re talking about, not AI. (I still don’t know the difference.) My brother Andrew, his ex-wife Maureen and her best friend are all computer engineers and they had a mini-debate at the table about whether or not we could use tools to detect things created by AI.

That debate started because I lamented AI would probably affect all future literary submissions to magazines. Now this is one thing I hadn’t thought about before when I insisted people don’t want to hear poems, music and stories created by machines. We still don’t want to but what we want only matters if nobody ever lies.

And as we know, people love to lie.

So, for example, how will a literary magazine be able to tell, post ChatGPT, whether a submission has been written by a human being or a machine? We’re on the honor system now. And the problem is letting machines write your poems is easier than doing it yourself. And we all know people who care more about getting published than they do about authorship in the first place. Why wouldn’t they let a machine try to create something that would get their name in print and then just lie.

I didn’t think about the lies.

How do we even prove we’ve created something? I’m imagining a scenario like Melanie Griffith in the movie Working Girl where she’s explaining to Harrison Ford the long and winding way she came up with her business idea to prove her boss, the lying Sigourney Weaver, did not.

And what’s to stop a literary magazine from one day deciding to let a machine write the whole thing? It’s a lot easier than dealing with those pesky, needy writers. And who would even know? Who would even be able to tell? Do we even have the time to even try to figure it out?

My brother thinks we’ll soon have machine tools to be able to suss out tell-tale markers of creative AI content. My other brother Randy then said “But won’t AI then just get smarter to outsmart the tools?” To which Andrew replied that the tool will just get smarter then too.

Oy. Sounds like a lot of work.

And then having worked in the Internet business for a while myself, I can see how even AI might not be able to slog through the onslaught of information burying us these days, (AI could process it but could it find what’s meaningful for us?) or even more distressing, I can see how one bug in the program could cause a lot of damage. Happens every day. We’re not smart enough to make perfect AI. (Although some day AI could be conceivably smart enough.)

Some people are even worried AI could cause not only the loss of all our professions, but the demise of humanity itself! Some alarming scenarios are proposed in an article in this week’s The Week. I’ve been talking about some of these apocalyptic scenarios with my Dad (a former computer hardware mechanic and software programmer) for years. But he sides with the machines! “Good-bye to bad rubbish,” I think he said. No help or sympathy there.

I spoke to my cousin Mark about it last Saturday. He says what I hear most of my writer friends say, “I’m just glad I’m at the end of my career and/or life.” But if you believe at all in reincarnation, you’ll probably just get reborn decades down the line, right back into this flaming dumpster fire so that’s not a real hope of escape. Besides, I’ve got maybe 40 years left if my family genes hold up. I’m not planning on retiring from creating.

My cousin Mark also said he’s heard about people forming communities around the idea of only consuming creative material made before 2023. And honestly, if each of us just tried to consume the mountains of creative material at our disposal made before 2023, we’d never run out of music, poems, fiction, movies, or TV shows. We’ve surely got enough stuff.

But that’s still not very comforting.

Creators might have to live with creating on a much smaller scale, with just a small circle of readers. Because the joy of making art isn’t just in consuming it. Humans love to make it. Making it, in fact, might be the most pleasurable part. And at the very least, we know whether we made it or not.

It feels like a big dumpster fire in the making. Let’s just all stop brushing our hair in protest.