Tuesday, August 31, 2010

coinkydink

So, right after I mentioned the Rolfer in the last blog, I met his son. Son of a Rolfer, go figure. Then we were talking about Lyssa and Lyssa called. All the time these things happen. My friend Don didn't believe in synchronicity. He had a bone to pick with Jung. Don died, and I still remember everything he said. Like my mom, he said great things. Unlike my mom, I listened to him and took his advice. He said, "Money's no expense" and "nobody should make me uptight in my own house." My father, who was like Don in his dark swarthy looks, said, "It only takes a little more to go first class." He also said, "I don't have to be a millionaire to live like a millionaire." He went, first class.

My mother called coincidence "coinkydinks." She had other funny names for things. When offered desserts she's ask for that Russian dessert, "one-of-iich." Or she'd confide that an acquaintance was a "pinintheas" which stood for pain in the ass. My mother died the month after 911, a spectacle I tried to shield her from. Her last night, as reported by her care giver, she said, "Pack your bags, sweetheart, we're going to Florida." So I figure that was her heaven, she's by the ocean.
How does all of this have anything to do with living the PL life? It must because it is my life and nobody is going to make me uptight in the house of it. I have many little jobs and a few larger jobs. None of it is brain surgery, but all of it has cut and mind.
The jewish holidays are coming. It is a chance to turn in, to prayer, and to give to charity. By doing so you might get inscribed in The Book of Life. One can ask and one does ask. it is also a good time to make peace with friends, to apologize, to come to clean center.

I spend time with the ancestors The weather is more beautiful than anything but God, and this isn't a coinkydink.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

SCROLL DOWN TO DATES

Sometimes I tune in to see if a fairy added a posting. I would like a deep and studious fairy, not a flighty one, so maybe I am waiting for the shoemaker's elves, a little more gritty in their leather aprons.

My poetry for kids is coming together. Please scroll down to dates to find out the why and wherefore of the PL life.

Today I am researching copyright and public domain. I might have been a lawyer if I hadn't gone hippie on myself. My first adult writing group in 1987 had seven lawyers, plus one Rolfer, one therapist (soon to be My Therapist), and a few sundry seekers. One woman gave me a number for her codependency group. Maybe it was because I drove to teach in a snowstorm and I had pneumonia, though didn't know it. I didn't realize then that writing wasn't life and death. Still don't.

Please check out my public appearances as Poet Laureate, a role with dignity. I am so happy to have shoes, thank you elves! JL

Saturday, August 14, 2010

What is missing

Today I am going to a benefit for Jinny Erdley, the midwife of not only my last child, but my first grandchild. She has lost her right arm to cancer. I spent the morning looking for, and finding, a poem she wrote to me in 1985 in response to one of my poems, and to being such friends in the ancient and loving mid-wife/mother/baby bond. I was thinking that knowing Jinny, losing will be the new whole. The newspaper article said she hasn't gone out much, but is figuring out how to knit and cook. I recall when she came to check me after Hope was born, there was goat shit on her top, and some straw, and it felt so whole and holy and New Mexico casual. Here's to the kind of wholeness that has missing parts, and still is filled with life force.

Now the baby of mine she delivered, Ana Hope, is in the field of infant and mother's health, a doula who provided emotional and practical support to women in Norteño land, working for Tewa Women United. I am inordinately proud of her, as I am all my three kids, and the three grandkids. I think during the first two kids the poet was the missing piece. I stopped writing until both were back in school. Too many deep places in me where my mom was at work. So the face was watching them, but sometimes the mind was missing. And then by Hope I was in my writer's life again, and my mind was definitely missing. She would read my face and get on my case for being a drifty and dreamy sort of mother. She had to share me with my career.

Now, I have another kind of wholeness. Just when I was ready to pack up shop and close the door, I get two years in a sweet and dreamy fast lane. I will be driving to town a lot, promoting things so someone shows up to events I have carefully planned,
and not an on-call grandmother. I will be missing, a little, in order to be present to my poetry life. Front burner, back burner,
my stove has five in all. Often there are several at work. But right now and for the first time, I am feeling like the poetry gets to be primary, for these days, or weeks, or hopefully two PL years that extends into the rest of my life, what I always wanted seems to be saying, "Come on Down..."

My dear Jinny has this patch in her life, I have a sweet time after the troubles of my 50's, my husband has retirement after working since he was five on the dairy farm. Every fullness alive has what is missing right up beside it. I am wish Jinny an impossible next phase, where she who has brough 1,000 babies into the world is brought 10,000 inspirations and joys.
Last summer we both were at a conference and it had been so long we didn't recognize one another, old women. It didn't make us sad, this is not Hollywood, it made us laugh.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Living La Vida Laureate

Even in the pool with a bathing cap and glasses, I got congratulated. Some stranger offered to share the lap lane with me and had read the article in the Rio grande Sun. Now we are pool friends, which is good cause I lost two pool friends last month
I had two congrats at the post office. Only one person in Española seemed pissed off at me. Priscilla said, "You live in Santa Fe." It felt as if I had defected to the other side, what ever place that is that we defect to. Maybe to wearing panty hose. Yes, I have defected to office wear and it's not casual Friday.

Living La Vida Loca Laureate is great. I drove to Albuquerque for a front yard reading, which was lovely, people liked my work and I liked their work. I then stayed over with a new best friend, Frances Mccain my only movie actress friend. I read some poems to her house-guests and then went to Church of Beethoven in the morning. Only in Albuquerque is classical music, poetry, two minutes of silence, and coffee the Sunday morning event. I met a friend, Pilo Bueno, from the old days of AIDS prevention and we talked about monogamy. So, it became worth it to drive 90 miles to read for 12 minutes.

Back home, Mike returns, we visit the kids in the yurt, and then today, Leland brings us a sauteed puffball. It is larger than a burger and quite yummy, only we already ate sweet corn from Espanola market, grown by Salvador, fish a la Trader Joe's, and
salad. We were eating with gusto after a nice feminine rain and watching Oprah about food and God. I am intellectually very positive and gusto-ish about puffballs, but I want to sample, not overdo. Maybe I could go on the wild mushroom diet.

Did I tell you life itself is having a gusto moment. I feel as excited as when I was back on the floor at John Hyson School's stage, teaching kids from Chimayo to write poems. It was the best thing ever, thirty years ago, and still is. I am going to go practice shaking a maraca while reciting "Eletelephony." I must to my art.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Staying Home so I can Wax Poetic or Wax the car

After a day at Ghost Ranch where I taught at my friends Dona Bolding and Susan Weber's Writing, Hiking, and Yoga class, i was so totally wiped out that the beauty of the cliffs as seen through my rose colored PL glasses almost did me in. I made it home and slept about 11 hours. Today, instead of being the perky run-around PL, I stayed home. Well, I did go for a swim at the Española pool and see my old pal, Stella, from Walgreens. Stella does not know she is in a poem in my book Rice. I don't think I will tell her, a girl needs her secrets.
I spent today typing up my poems for our next Tres Chicas Books book, Greatest Hits: Love & Death. I hope we can keep the ampersand. I am partial to them. Typing up all the love poems of my life is curious. marriage is the background music to various crushes, old loves, and flights of fancy. I hesitate to use the word "drone" to refer to marriage because you'll take it the wrong way. The great Ravi Shankar would know what I mean, that underlying resonance that makes it all possible.
Then I wonder about great loves I have held that were way more about my psychology than about another person. I am having a love connection with myself which is totally focused on another human. I like the book Invisible Partners by John Stanford.
It is required reading before you read my poems. I got about 23 pages typed, and look forward to typing more and learning more about who I was 30 years back. I like my writing, I was very precise and the use of imagery is something I could learn something from. I mean something from which I could learn.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Dates to date, Living La Vida Local

Labor Day at the Railyard
Monday, September 6, 12:00-3:00 pm, at some point at this picnic of free food, I'll be reading a poem written for the event.

Premier reading at Collected Works:: Thursday, September 23, 6:00.
Joan Logghe with read with Alvaro Cardona-Hine, her dear friend. His recent book from UNM Press is The Curvature of the Earth with the late Gene Frumkin.and Joan will read from works in progress . Joan has worked closely over the years with Collected Works and wants to honor this important bookstore for poetry, and her dear and inspiring friend. Cardona-Hine is a poet, painter, and composer and lives beside the gallery in Truchas with his wife, Barbara McCauley, who also paints and writes beautifully.

Joan and the Giant Pencil:: Sunday, September 26, 2-4:00 PM at the Museum of Art, In a program for young children and their parents, Santa Fe’s Poet Laureate, Joan Logghe, will be accompanied by musician Jeremy Bleich. They will present a program suitable for the early elementary years, ages 6-9 give or take. After the performance with children will be invited to write in the galleries, accompanied by an adult. This a launch for a similar program to be offered to four schools during the school year.
Free admission to all.

Women's Festival of the Book, Annie Lamott reading at the Lensic September 28 and yours truly does the intro!
on Saturday, October 2 at 1:30 I will be reading at the Meem, a beautiful space adjacent to new History Museum. Many great poets, fiction, cookbook, etc. writers for Two Whole days and Free, ladies.

GHost Ranch, Living Life Twice, Writing the Sacred Down, Oct 3- 9. www.ghostranch.org, check it out and come on up.

Southside Library. Joan and the GIant Pencil, Tuesday, October 19 at 4;00 for their after school program. For kids and their adults to have fun with poetry, write a group poem, and hear a poetry and music performance.

Broadsides Reading and Exhibit: A Spirited Reading. Meem Room, at Museum of History on the Santa Fe Plaza, Friday, October 29-6:00-8:00, reading to celebrate the Broadsides by Tom Leech and the Palace Press. Broadside poets and artists will meet to read from and celebrate this series done with letter press, and on handmade paper.

Museum of International Folk Art::
Sunday, November 14, 2:00-4:00, Writing in the Galleries, in conjunction with the show, Material World, Textiles and dress from the collection. Free Sundays with New Mexico driver's license .

OG

Life is so full of clouds these days. And I am on the move, from Abiquiu where I read at The Inn and stayed over to swim in The Lake, and celebrate our 39th anniversary and 40 years deep. Then I had to be celebrated at Rancho de Chimayo. And that was great with our gang of Friday night revelers. But the best part of that was that Arturo Jaramillo was there, helping out as his way long ex-wife had broken her leg. I mean we're talking 25 years ago. And we remembered each other and he was as handsome as ever. It was one of those moments in time, the former hippies of the Nambé road meet the esteemed restauranteur. Only now we are both elders.

Then I had to compose a pink poem for the 8th color party at my friends Bette and Richard's house. I was the Poet Laureate of the color party for many years. So this ripple out is satisfying. The pink effect was wonderful and my three grandkids each made color party friends which I am hoping can be a tradition. And then.... I went to a hip hop show all dressed in pink which made me feel even fogeyer than I am, until I remembered my bowling shirt. Nothing like a Poet Laureate bowling shirt to shed some years (and add some pounds). Idris Goodwin invited me to read. He asked if I had "some in my dome." Now my dome is pretty tundra-esque, sparse clumps of lichen and the like. But I had books in the car (I am known for selling out of the way-back) and I read an "Espanola Pantoum." Idris can spit poems on his feet, free style, and I am paging through ones I wrote twenty years ago.
He called me "OG". And when I asked, it stands for "Original Gangster." The words that came to mind, after "old Gal" were "Oy Gevalt!" which is Yiddish for what were you thinking when you came to this venue where you could be everyone's mother if not grandmother?" Another translation is "Oh, the powers that be, the force of it!" A Yiddish proverb is "We come into this word with an Oy!----and leave with a gevalt!"

But by the end of the evening, we were family thanks to the menschlich qualities of Idris Goodwin. He celebrated each performer, the guy Patch from Silver City who had never been to Santa Fe, the 2Bers who are wonderful performers, hip hop with a bit of singer songwriters besides, and this ego riddled PL. I got to hug the 2Bers kids, Iris and Annabel, whose grandmother was a dear friend and passed on five years ago. Here's to Ellie, Your kids are doing great.

This morning Idris asked me to blurb his book. Have I arrived or what, or am I simply traveling the outer routes of my inner joy.
Speaking of which, Henry Real Bird, the Poet Laureate of Montana is riding his horse across his state handing out poetry books. People take care of him, feeding him drief beef and traditional foods of his Crow nation.
Anyhow, signing off, JL as the PL (and OG)