Thanks to the Illustrating Pirate

One of the jolting pleasures of being a publishing poet in the age of the Web is to stumble on a poem that has gone on adventures without my knowledge. The Niches section of my website collects links to poems I've come across on, among other places, a Spelunking site and a Wine-tasting site.

But recently I had an experience that topped all these—to find "Two Into Two" at a very special and mysterious website, accompanied by a remarkable choice of illustration that taught me more than I maybe even wanted to know about my own poem. I wrote the poem in an entirely different and luminously innocent context, or so I thought; but this illustration, insightfully it seems to me, brings out other aspects: power and patriarchy and disfigurement.

Oddly, these meanings also seem to have been added onto the text they originally illustrate.  The apparent source for the tale, "The Knave of Hearts" by Louise Sargent, is a tale of tarts far, far more innocuous than Parrish's illustration implies.

To Arouse Secrets: The Visceral Magic of Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg's exuberant, quiet, sloppy, painstaking, organic, sensual, spiritual Combines entered my life during my now-somewhat-infamous days living in the East Village in New York. They perfectly captured and enhanced the major alchemical powers I needed to (barely) get through those challenging years. Shamanic totems, they channeled me through simplicity in the midst of sophistication. I have gotten a visceral charge of joy and power from my encounters with them ever since—most recently in 2005, touring the Met's retrospective of the Combines in the company of Charles Altieri, delightful friend and brilliant literary critic.

The letter above is posted by way of thanks to Rauschenberg—and as a reminder that I aim to "not feel shame in my joy nor regret or fright in history."

The Valentine's Ball: Where The Goddess and Poetry Mate

I have been decorating the house like mad, since tonight Glen and I are hosting a Valentine's Ball. The decor involves silky sari cloth in rich colors, little silken nooks out of pre-Raphealite paintings, sparkling lights and votives, big sparkly red hearts. There is something extremely liberating about all this, sobering in light of the fact that in some places in the world, one could be jailed for wearing red on Valentine's Day.

This is probably the first mega-party we've ever thrown that wasn't for Halloween/Samhain/my birthday. It's very different kind of fun, and it fits the season—the whiteness of the snow suddenly seeming dramatic, somehow indulgent, more sensuous than stark, the murmurings among the birds hinting at matings to come, the thaw of Imbolc, just two weeks ago now, almost imperceptibly spreading further along. . .

The Magical, Manic Poets: Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language

"If left-hemispheric dominance for language is not the ‘natural’ condition of human beings aged eight and older, but rather, a side effect of print literacy, then it stands to reason that the qualitative changes in consciousness between
oral and print cultures—from community identity, ‘magical thinking,’ pervasive animist spirituality, and poetry to individualism, science, and rationalism, faith-based religion or agnosticism/atheism, and prose—may be the outward signs
of a fundamental shift from right- to left-hemispheric structuring of conscious thought processes and memories.”

—Julie Kane, "Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language," p. 16

On Not Being White: For Robbie Burns Day

The timing was perfect. Just on Robbie Burns' birthday, a lovely little package arrived from a small town in Scotland--the "Scottish lace panel" I had ordered from Ebay to filter the glare in my writing studio window. It's replete with red deer, Edinburgh Castle, and the word "Scotland" facing four different directions. What more could a Scottish American poet want?

Though i was raised with a steady awareness of my roots, I guess my coming-out as a Scottish American really started last year, as I was sitting in on the "writing about race" workshop we have started offering at Stonecoast due to student demand.

What is a Witch? What is a Poet? What is a Poetess?

When the first definition came to me, I was tired from the exciting rigors of a Stonecoast residency but had centered myself with water, air, and thought. I thought of it while driving to the Stone House to teach a workshop:

A witch is someone who is so sensitive to the energy of the physical world that they have found it necessary to cultivate (perhaps initially as a survival skill!) the innate human ability to notice and change that energy. (Starhawk put it more succinctly: a witch is someone who can change consciousness at will).

Weathering the Work of Change: Marginalization in Popular Culture and Poetry

My cousin Charlie Finch, writer and Senior Critic for Artnet Worldwide, sent some words of advice in response to my recent post about Avatar: "I think one needs to tread very carefully when dealing with expensive cultural phenomena such as "Avatar" or Susan Boyle. These are cultural anvils dropped from on high with the apparent touch of a feather that are designed to manipuate our emotions and separate us from our wallets and our identities, so "caveat emptor.""