At a bus stop, a man defied the driver, wouldn’t let a disabled woman have her right of way. When he saw the annoyance on the passengers’ faces he warned us to keep our mouths shut. His hostility jolted me out of my usual daydream.
Walking down Kearny Street, an eight inch knife flew out of a window, narrowly missing a pedestrian. My awareness was heightened. The homeless seemed more vivid and conspicuous, parading in their rags. In Bart, people stare down at their cell phones and plug up their ears.
Are we a society segregated by technology? How cultured are we when one man’s arrogance can silence a bus, and the homeless are accepted as part of the cityscape? A sadness permeated my day. I have no answer to these questions.
It’s the last thing I want to see in my mailbox but here it is, long, white, with my own hand writing and stamp. I don’t even need to open it to know what’s inside. The sealed and delivered thin envelope contains my failure and rejection. The slip of paper inside has only two sentences. Thank you for your submission. We regret that we are unable to publish it. It invariably ignites a host of negative feelings and ruins my morning.
I put the unsavory letter in my drawer along with the others. Every writer has to have a rejection pile. With the growing on-line submission I even use a dedicated email address to account for all the rejections. They seem a little less ghostly without the white envelope but the disappointment is the same.
I feel sorry for myself for a little while. Moan about it to my cats. And then…and then…go to the next call for submission and stuff the poems into another envelope. SASE be damned.
After our Two Tongues of Gaia debut last night a man came up to me and asked, “What’s the story on the snakes?” He was referring to one of the poems I read, titled The Chase.
When I was in the Moroccan Sahara Desert in 2007 I had a vision of a massive exodus. In order to travel long distance humans and animals changed shapes and forms and piggybacked on each other. Tolls had to be paid before services were rendered. So the further they went, the less they possessed and thus memories of their origin were lost along the way.
About two weeks after I came back to San Francisco I had a vivid dream. I was wakened by something that was moving in my bed, slithering between my sheets. I forced my eyes opened. In the dim morning light I heard a crackling sound and saw two snakes with arched bellies racing across the room.
Did I carry the snakes home? What did they pay to get out of the desert? I sometimes wonder what have become of them: lost souls huddling in a corner down Mission Street, or lounging in an Arabic grocery store? Three years later one of the Berbers I met in the desert won the Green Card lottery and arrived in San Francisco. He is now going to school and working in a Moroccan restaurant.
There were few women poets at the Sacred Grounds when I started attending the readings in 2001. So whenever one of the women stopped going her absence would be felt by the group. For about three years I was only able to attend the readings sporadically due to my work and my children’s schedules. But each time I went back I felt the warm welcome, that my fellow poets had saved a space in their hearts for me.
Jehanah Wedgwood (the hostess) aside, Eleanor Watson-Gove (editor of the Sacred Grounds Anthology), Syreia Witt, Marsha Campbell, Gaya Jenkins, Selene Steese and me were the regulars at that time. Then, Eleanor moved to Portland. Syreia Witt died. Selene quit her job in San Francisco to become a full time poet. She began her own reading series, S.O.U.P. in Oakland. Gaya suffered all kinds of ailments and moved to the East Coast. Jehanah passed away last year. Marsha stopped coming because of heart surgery and various housing problems.
Barbara Bel Diamond, the spunky dark-haired Canadian with her signature beret came to Sacred not much later after me. She had been a steady presence on the Wednesday night circuit until recently, when she began her own reading series at Sacred on Saturday afternoons. Deirdre Trian, the beautiful witch-goddess has been our iconic figure in the past six years.
There are more women who grace the Grounds now and the balance between the genders are improving. A couple of weeks ago Marsha Campbell came back looking trim and ever graceful. I realized how much I had missed her stunning poetry, her tremulous voice resulted from throat surgery and her out of tune guitar. As she walked up to the mike she was greeted by thunderous applause—a fitting way to welcome back a great dame.
After reading about the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo on my blog, my friend Diana offered me two books: Bound Feet and Western Dress by Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, and Agnes Smedley, The Life and Times of an American Radical by Janice and Stephen MacKinnon. Bound Feet was the story of the poet’s first wife and Agnes Smedley was at one time the poet’s lover. Apparently Pearl Buck also had an affair with him. Xu Zhimo died in a plane crash in 1931. He was 34 years old.
Xu Zhimo was the Chinese Shelley. A proponent of free love, a worshiper of beauty, he was way ahead of his times. Bound Feet retold the struggles between ideology and tradition. But it was also about love and how it triumphed above all the conflicts. His family and friends, including his first wife, though hurt by his infidelity and irresponsibility, loved and respected him for who he was.
How modern are we, living in the 21st Century? What progress in freedom and tolerance for the arts has China made since the times of Xu Zhimo? In the news, a photo shows a parade of Chinese couples in tuxes and snow white bridal gowns. But to me the bandages of bound feet are still visible and the dress remains an illusion.
A poet’s job is to dream. To qualify, you must start by shedding earthly reality. Only in dreaming does a poet write. Even if one writes about the real world, it has to come from a place that is not.
Perhaps that is why taking drugs is favorable. A little mushroom lets the mind go free into other dimensions. Maybe drugs and alcohol are part of the job description.
To consciously dream without the aid of substance, to will oneself into a trance takes discipline. It’s not an act of clearing the mind, rather, letting the mind wander upon a neuron and allow it to take you where it wants to go. Many result in dead ends. But invariably there is a path unlike all the others. You’ll recognize it because it is energetic. The poet must chronicle the journey in that instance by whatever means. A poem is born.
When confronted by reality poets inevitably strike back, and sadly being mislabeled as lazy or weird or selfish. Eyes glazed, body slumps over books, walking in circles, mumbling, disengaged in social settings—the poet is at work. Do not disturb.
After a day of piano teaching there is nothing more enjoyable than coming home and watching a movie. Not the brainy type that I usually go for, but something that has a good kick, literally and metaphorically, to release all the stress and anxiety that build up from hours of beating time.
Black and white Kung Fu movies in the 1960’s incorporated fighting, fantasy, magic and romance. Many of the actors and actresses did fight scenes utilizing their Chinese opera training. In the cinema, the audience would snicker at the main characters who were obviously hired because of their pretty faces and not their fighting ability. Even as a child I could tell if someone was doing a proper horse stance.
Special effects were the magic. With a push of the hand a snake or a sword would rush out in a stream of air. They could travel in the sky or enter a chamber to poison an enemy. I remember especially a woman’s floating head, bopping from house to house in the deep of night, trying to avenge the person who severed her body.
Because of their popularity, many Kung Fu movies were cheaply and quickly made with shallow plots and bad acting. Although some good ones have come out in recent years. The two Ip Man movies starring Donnie Yen took time to explore the characters and the background of the story. But the fighting is brutal and much faster now. The catastrophe is more than epic. The stuns are incredible with each scene outdoing the previous ones. After all the blood and gore I usually get a second wind, and turn my attention back to writing a poem.
Written in the middle of the 18th Century, Dream of the Red Chamber was a novel about the rise and fall of a Chinese aristocratic family. With three generations living under one roof, there were plenty of restless young people. They partied by hosting poetry salons, drinking wine, eating delicacies, singing, reciting, improvising, writing with prompts or dovetailing each other’s verse.
Poetry is clearly not a favorite pastime in the 21st Century, yet the idea of salon has not faded. It is still being held at people’s homes, although minus the servants who waited on the poets hand and foot. Now we potluck, use paper plates and plastic forks. It is much less stylish. But poets are romantic people. If the Red Chamber’s characters came to our modern day salon I’m sure they’ll feel just at home.
I walked into the gynecologist’s office and gave my name. The receptionist turned to the doctor and said,”Your 9am Pap is here.” Thank you very much. I never went back again.
My friend Bill feeds a lot of cats but he never names them. He says if you give them names they are yours. Naming brings you closer to the being and you get attached to it.
I give my three cats multiple names. They respond to all of them. Sometimes they are just theme and variations, like Cali—Cookie—Wookie—Waiwai—Mooki—Lookie—and so on. When I chant her names I swear I see a big smile on Cookie’s face.
This morning one of the animal magnets fell from the refrigerator.
“Pick up the giraffe.” I said to Dore.
” What’s its name?” He asked as he picked it up. “It has a name. Is your name human?”
“Gigi.” I came up with one.
“I like that,” Dore smiled. “Gigi is a beautiful name.”
For half a year, Jannie Dresser appeared daily on my computer screen in the form of a prompt. Each night I scratched my head until I wrote a poem and posted it on her internet classroom.
We finally met in early July, when Jannie began a poetry appreciation workshop in North Berkeley. It was an informal gathering. We sat in a circle and read poems that have been published in journals and magazines, then discussed our likes and dislikes. Much of the time the advanced language and expressions made me feel like I was diving into a deep pool of water and struggling not to get drowned. I have a long way to go with comprehension.
One of my college professors once said he learned to read German by staring at it. I had a similar experience. I learned to read classical Chinese by staring at a novel until the sentences began to make sense. It’s all intention. If you stare at something long and hard enough it’ll have to come alive. I’ll keep staring at Jannie’s workshop.
At a bus stop, a man defied the driver, wouldn’t let a disabled woman have her right of way. When he saw the annoyance on the passengers’ faces he warned us to keep our mouths shut. His hostility jolted me out of my usual daydream.
