Two Posts in One day.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! somebody once said.  Maybe he was talking about today.


We had a great meeting with Sunstone Press and they are indeed going to publish Odes & Offerings, the book of both poems and images from the visuals artists.  Rod Lambert is on board and Sabrina Pratt from the Community Gallery and Santa Fe Arts Commission respectively. I am sort of jazzed and totally happy that the artists and poets will get a little longevity through print.   And you know, I am a bookish girl thanks to my late mother, the famous Beti, where it all began with Dr. Seuss and Robert Louis Stevenson.   Beti would be thrilled that my education led to something, besides raising chickens and veggies,  and becoming a grandmother, though she was called GG by her one "Great" as they call the third generation.


Then I was on Honey Harris' show.  She is delightful, I never met her before.  I was so psyched about getting there on time that I never mentioned the book.  But I did pretty well for seven minutes.  
Here it is:http://www.santafe.com/podcasts/listen/honey-visits-with-santa-fe-poet-laureate-joan-logghe

Then I rushed back to the Palace Press and got a knock out poster for the reading, 
JUST WORDS AWAY, with Valerie Martinez and Arthus Sze on April 27, Friday at 6:00 at the auditorium of the New Mexico History Museum.


THEN... I went to the gallery and ran into Jessie White and had a good chat.  She liked the show very much and so will you. Artist Kuzana Ogg's friends Stephanie and Margaret were there and very lovely.  I want to just move a futon there and live in the gallery, but I fear that is a bit extreme.


Then I got invited to be the speaker for the Nava Elementary sixth grade "continuance."
I have never been invited to a continuance before and accepted with great solemnity.  
I feel so touched by this. 


See what I mean about when things are finishing up.  It's perfectly ecstatic. And WS Merwin tonight at the Lannan Foundation.  Do you think after meeting him last year I can call him WS?


May I repeat myself again---   


O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!  
     ("Jabberwocky," just in case you didn't have Beti to read to you as a child.)

But who is Counting? I am.

One month and twenty days left as PL.  Now everybody is asking me what will I do afterwards.
Sometimes I make a joke, "You mean Post Poet Laureate Stress Syndrome?" It's a joke nobody finds funny, so of bad taste I guess.  Sometimes I know I have been doing this same work for thirty years and it won't be exactly a shock.  Sometimes I am feeling I can't wait for peace and quiet to rear up again. And sometimes I think, who knows, the creative life has its mystery.

But in the meantime I have been full tilt, non-stop, having a blast spreading the poetic joy. If I never hear the words April Is Poetry Month again, it's okay.  Today I have to drive in and out of Santa Fe twice, early and late for all the right reasons, a possible book, a radio appearance which is an oxymoron, and hearing WS Merwin who I got to intro exactly a year ago at the Egyptian Theater in Boise.  He doesn't use punctuation when we writes poetry and he doesn't use capital letters when he speaks.

This I what I did this week.  Jeremy Bleich and I did Joan and the Giant Pencil to about 90 wiggling and wonderful second graders at Cesar Chavez Elementary.  Their teacher, Reverie Escobedo, should teach the goddess class in classroom management.  She has them clapping, singing, and listening into silence in English and Spanish.

Here we are. That's Reverie, Jeremy with the beard and drums, me, and some kids reading in Spanish and playing rainsticks.

Then yesterday, in my hometown of Española, I got to spend three hours with a program called The First Year Experience Program at Northern New Mexico College.  The idea is that if people can make it through their first year of college, they are well on their way. I saw half a dozen instructors I knew and read poems, lectured at great and embarrassing lengths, and wrote with about 80 people.  Terry Mulert, one of the instructors actually said, "Would you do me a favor?  Please talk about yourself."  That was the most hysterically funny thing said to me in the two years as PL and non-stop self promotion.  And here we are:

New Poet Laureate in Burque

You probably know, I mean how couldn't you.  Hakim Bellamy was named the first PL of ABQ.
I got to be there and be surprised, though there was no drum roll except in my stomach, and Mayor Berry just let the sleepy cat out of the bag.  And I had been so careful not to find out.  Like not knowing the ending of a football game you had prerecorded.

But still, that didn't take away the joy at being there, getting to read, and feel the absolute right choice being made.  There they are, Levi Romero, Stewart Warren, Susan McCallister, Don McIver, Mindy Grossberg, Mayor Richard Berry, Hakim Bellamy, Me, and Valerie Martinez.  We have two SF PL's, one mayor of a growing western city, one Centennial poet since we are 100 this year as my mother would have been and the Titanic,  four poetry activists, an esteemed group.

I am noticing that I used to be tall and in the back row. Something has changed.  Thanks for noticing my green decor, I got these dynamite green jeans at St. Vinvcent de Paul.  But enough about me.

I am going to try and paste in Hakim's speech:  By gosh, I think I did it.

I rode the train home, so windy you couldn't see the Sandia Mountains, not even a smudge where they belonged.  I was just so happy and singing inside, too tired to tell the Sex in the City beautiful lawyers from Houston who worked in immigration rights and could have been my new RailRunner best friends, how happy I was.  I made it home, breezily.  I was so tired, you'd think I did something.

I want to tell Hakim, that he has already been doing the work.  I know that I just did my life to the nth power, no back burner, on steroids.  I got asked to do a lot more things, some great fun like the Santa Fe High Graduation keynote and Joan & the Giant Pencil (one tomorrow!!), and some deeply odd.  But I think I enjoyed almost every one.  I only lost my voice at the end of two.  Note to self:  Don't read at the Cooperage on graduation weekend.

But do go to Odes & Offerings and the listing of PL events at Santa Fe Arts Commission website. Don't go on Sunday or Monday as the gallery is closed as many people have been telling me.

Michael Namingha of the Arts Commish is tweeting my haiku to folks to drum up good applicants for Santa Fe's next PL.  Nobody tweets me because I just learned to text.  I have a new motto, gleaned from the work at the Community Gallery.  "Text is the new Next."  I think it's catchy.  ABQ has a motto, "On the page, on the stage."  I like it.  I like everything about it, except how short I look in the line-up.

Offerings redux

I remember the good old days when we made and delivered Valentines and I was the good PL.
Now I am on the outs with about half my friends, there is a buzz both good and bitter, and I thought I was going to have to eat my words about the SF Reporter, but they managed to have an article this week (yay!) and not mention my part in  (O & O) even though the picture they included was Bernadette Freer's process in tackling my poem, "Unpunctuated Awe" to WS Merwiin.

Here is a nostalgic look at the good old days. The carefree Poet Laureate Living La Vida Local Life.

Now I am feeling like a cross between Judy Chicago on a bad day, and Grandma Moses on a good.
My sophistication and naivté at war with one another.  You see, though the art show is fabulous, the most in attendance ever at Community Gallery, and most people happy.  The poets are fuming.
It seems that though I was advised to not display the poems, and pictured people milling around, studiously, with booklets of poems in hand that they pour over, the poets wanted wall space.  I understand, honestly I do.  I would be bad-mouthing myself if I weren't me.  I would be critical in the nicest of ways, "What was Joan thinking? This PL thing has addled her, gone to her head, and forgot to post the poems."  But no, friends of mine who are miffed, we thought we were doing a good thing, and it has, indeed set up a longing for the poems, a magnetism, a conversation about art and poetry.

Forgive me my perspective, though Michael forbids me to say I am sorry. I guess that is what love is also, getting to tell a person you are not sorry.  I am, though.  I hate to roil the poetic waters, muddy the iambics, ruffle the swan feathers.  At least, I told Mike, I was not swanning around at the Opening, but handing out name tags and answering the phone from my friend Robin who was robbed.

Get people hither to the show!  Booklets are there, the air is clear and clean, you can see the work and read the poems at your leisure.  Closed Sunday and Monday.

OMG O & O

     May I just come out and say it right there.  It rocked. The Opening of Odes & Offerings.  36 poets/36 artists. Some hung out to collaborate, some never met until last night, some didn't show. Though the newspapers forgot to mention it, and the catalogue of poems got ever so slightly mashed, and my friend Robin who is the reason I moved to new Mexico after I met her in 1969 in a Chicago Heights school, the Cottage Grove School to be precise, got robbed at CVS parking lot by Sunflower Market,  and my throat practically fell off from meeting and greeting folks, it still rocked.  I am so sorry Robin,  Thanks for making the effort to come to     The Opening until you got robbed. Glad you got your phone and credit cards back. These really are becoming desperate times, sort of post-Apoplectic, I mean friends are being robbed at knife point in Chimayo where before there was only break-ins while we were out.

     All of this is why we need acts of extreme beauty, which this show was.  Not beauty as in the surface, or my mother's Beauty Shop, but beauty as in connection, community, celebration.  I have a new thought. Just once.  On my way back from Florida  at the Dallas airport I ran into the ever gorgeous Anne Marie Garcia on her way to Costa Rica.  When her gate got changed we were scooped up by the playboy of the carts that come through and say, "Move away, a cart is coming. Beep beep beep."  Anne Marie was even making the beeping sounds.  She asked if we were supposed to be disabled to get a ride, and though I did point out I have a maybe broken toe and elevated my foot, I also realized that we were handicapped, I know that isn't a PC word, but for this purpose I need to use it.  I realized we were handicapped by Extreme Beauty. I am going to tell everyone that I am compromised in this way. Last night was a big part of it.
     Tobie-who-is-here-on -Sabbatical understands.  We are both total devotees to beauty, even thought beauty has gotten a bad name of late.  I'm sorry, my mother had a beauty salon and I was dressed and educated by the money she earned in beauty, raised by beauty, answered the phone for beauty, and took out its rollers and pin curls. Last night I raised my poems to the sky to show my mother and father, right there in front of whoever was left in the Gallery After The Show.  Oh, the show.  I got a bit off track.

     People seemed really happy and excited about it, mostly.  I want everybody to come back, spend some time with the poems which will be in catalogue form, look over our books of poetry.  I have to admit, I smuggled in poetry.  I have become a beauty smuggler and the artists were my accomplices. Someone who shall remain nameless even though he is the ultra handsome and cool partner of someone else who shall remain nameless, said that poetry was made accessible.  I think not having the poems easily there created a magnetism and longing for the poems.  When do we stand out in public and long for poems?
    Come back, public and newspapers and people not invited or juried in.  Come back to beauty and longing and the Poetry Reading Room we set up, comeback to your own work and not being included or being included and whatever creative waves that sets up in you.  Two months, fifteen days left.  Now I get to experience my other thought, the one I had leaving Boston after college in 1969.  The ends of things are intense and you may fall in love or get a boyfriend, or have a sunset as pink and purple as my Uncle Sydney's painting of the mountains that hung in our Pittsburgh dining room.
     As I left Boston, the light was bright, I had boys around me, the guy we called The Sun God because he shined with handsome and another high school boyfriend. I met the intensity of endings.  Here I am again, how to end the poem?  Emily Dickinson said it should feel as if the top of your head blew off. A bit intense for these post-Apoplectic times but I am staring to feel blown away. I want to get back to my writing, to the grandkids, to gardening.  I want to sew more PoemHolderstm and sell them so I can spoil the grandkids in a good way.  I'm a long way from a new boyfriend, but my husband is looking ultra cute in his new SHELL LUMBER cap and black shirt.  End times.  New PL times.  Who could be more appreciative than I have been to serve.  Did I mention that three or four pieces sold and I don't even get a kick-back?

     Come to the show, oh ye masses, and write some reviews would you. Hold onto your purses in parking lots, invite friends to collaborate, take a Sabbatical if only a day or week, and smuggle in beauty when you can. This blog, it turns out, is my ode and offering.  Thanks TJ for setting me up in it.  I am answering the phone to beauty, and texting her handmaidens. I finally have arrived from the Back East where I set out west in 1969, with only my blue VW between me and this vast sky.

Odes & Offerings Eve

     I believe this is considered the Eve of the Opening for Odes & Offerings, a collaborative art event where 36 poets sent me four poems and then I worried about all the poets I didn't invite and even more about the ones who never even blew me off, just didn't respond, and the 36 artists who were juried in, not by me, but by people who didn't include a few of my best friends.  That collaboration. It is the Eve even though it isn't 6:00 AM yet and there was barely a calendar listing in The Reporter.
     I am pretty sure the Reporter has it in for me, perhaps because I am over sixty and long-married and live next to my chickens.  They have never even mentioned in two years that I got to be PL and serve the city in ways visible and invisible, not once. Maybe they have an anti-poet laureate policy or had a friend they thought would have done a better job.
     Maybe they got wind of what I have been saying about their Dan Savage column, that though I know from my very hip bi-sexual and tall friend that he only talks about consensual sex,  and have considered her response, still, some of the kids don't need free access to some of his topics.  I lap it up like yogurt, but only in an over sixty, long married, living next to the chickens and two turkeys sort of way. I am the grandmother of three and I occasionally feel that Dan Savage should run his column by the Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers or the Pope.  Not that I am bitter that The Reporter featured a really interesting tattoo artist's history of the swastika, a piece about Steve Reich's "Different Trains" which is a composition I adore, and my friend Jeremy's show which I will go to, and barely a calendar listing for the 72 artists involved in this show. I want to go on record here saying that I am a big fan of tattoo art, I really am, and speak out for it at many public occasions.  But I am also a pretty huge fan of poetry, and that is why I got the idea to have it smuggled into the visual arts. Come on you art-centric city, cut us some slack.  I think perhaps I am not behaving well, representing my city. Maybe it is what happens at the end of a two year tenure, or, as a friend said, racing for the barn.
     I am really just back from Florida where the highlight of the trip besides the beaches, the food, the lap pool, and perhaps breaking my little toe was Shell Lumber.  My brother took me there.  He is nine years my elder, but I sort of caught up, and since my childhood he has known what I love.  He bought me a doll with nylon stockings from his summer job money, got me my first library card, and took me to a frat party when I was nine. Now he and I are both grandparents and both love hardware stores.  The thing about Shell Lumber is that they have about three city blocks of lumber,  They have wood with names you never heard of and so they have the pronunciation right on the tag along with $11.50 per foot.  My favorite thing was the molding display which was beautiful and covered an entire wall.  I loved the shapes of it, the skinny and the fluted, and I did document on my cell phone which I don't know how to use, being over 60, rural, and married so long we each have our areas of expertise. So, try to image how beautiful this molding, only the ends mind you, is.  There is a certain old school eros in beautifully displayed lumber.
     That is how I feel about poetry.  It is the non structural part of life, the part that covers over the seams, connects the wall to the floor, and is totally useless except for beauty. There are crown moldings and cornice, dentil, egg and dart, and the ever popular rope molding.  I think they correspond to poetic forms that decorate the cracks.  My brother and I delighted in the bustle of the Floridian bros,  and he bought my husband a SHELL LUMBER cap. I talked non-stop, the entire week of my visit, at the pool and at dinner, about this art show.  My brother and Carol even gave me a check to help document the event.  My friend Tobie-who-is-here-on-Sabbatical (that is her name) suggested I use the check to buy an outfit for the opening. I might swing by St. Francis de Paws thrift store and see if they have anything that is not too hardware looking.  Oh, The Reporter did mention me once when my book was voted one of the Best of Santa Fe,without me lobbying anyone to do so, a common practice.  They listed me on the un-cool side of their coolness spectrum. I kid you not, as my 9th grade teacher was wont to say.
   Well, the turkeys need to be fed and I need to see what practices Dan Savage is condoning and explaining to the uninitiated this week.  The paper is feeling pretty thin.  I am sure they were just on a poetry intolerance diet, like all my friends who eat no wheat or dairy. I promise I will not sneak into town and peek through the Community Gallery windows.
   

Blog of my heart

I am two weeks behind.   I am not cut out for this pressure.
Speaking of pressure, Mike seemed to fix the water which was turned off at the source, our well and pump.

I am not convinced it is fixed, something about red roots.  But I digress.

The red roots I meant to talk about two weeks ago was the second annual Valentine's Drive-By-Love-In.
Poeple met at Marguerites two Saturdays, made 300 amazing Valentines, ate soup, and read love poems from India aloud. The second Saturday I had a no-drive day when my friend Tobie, famously here on sabbatical, came out to La Puebla with high end Whole Foods soup and we made Valentines all afternoon.

Marguerite set the stage by contacting four area retirement/care/elder facilities.  Whenever I don't know the correct term I throw a lot of words at it.  Marguerite and her  friend Katrina came  up with this idea and I am but a humble servant of its genius and love. Marguerite called each place and we had times on V- Day at Rosemont, Sierra Vista, El Castillo, and Ponce de Leon in that order.  I obsessed about how many Hershey's kisses was the correct amount.  This is in honor of my mother, who didn't obsess, but who handed out kisses at the Jewish Home for the Aged where she went to flirt, dance, and generally cheer up old folks who were younger that she.  At her memorial my niece brought kisses. Love always reminds me of my mother, also aging women, also beauty.  She would be so into this project.

My friend Tobie is on the far end looking festive

                                                

We met at Dulce, my latest cupcake nook, and began handing out Valentines on the spot, especially to the woman whose peaceful morning we infringed on by meeting at her table.  Our first visit was  Rosemont. Tobie drove, which I knew meant for adventure.  Marguerite navigated and whenever she said turn right, my back seat GPS navigator Garmin mind was yelling, "Left left," but not out loud.  This is the difference between friendship and marriage.

We made it there and unloaded our Kisses and card laden car and noticed on our way in that a priest with a guitar strode in quickly to get ahead of us.  Also, there was a school bus in the parking lot.  These were not good signs for our red clad, eight deep, Valentine toting crew.  I'll cut to the chase.  Last year we had a perfectly fine cast to sing our songs, read our poem, and dispense our holiday cheer to, and this year we had two and a half if you count the woman in the elevator. But of course it was made up in quality.  I fell totally for Virginia Stowall who is 102.  She lived in Los Alamos for 60 years.  So much for my fears of radioactivity. Downwind isn't enough. I should move there.  She was showing me how to make a necklace of buttons and had many more marbles than I do on most days.  There was a man in a wheelchair and said elevator lady who said she never had received a Valentine in her life and bestowed many deeply religious blessings on us. We also got to mix it up with the students from the charter school for the Arts and Technology and hear a song from Pippin, a musical I've never seen or heard.

Our next stop was Sierra Vista where my friend Gary Mex Glazner does many an Alzheimer Poetry Project visit and they are primed for poetry.  We got to sing a little, and "A Bushel and a Peck" was another homage to my mom, the famous Beti with an "i."  It was one of their songs too, a client about twenty years younger than I pointed out. Alzheimer's is that way.  There was also a new resident who was active in poetry in San Francisco, a real soul mate.  So, it went very well there and we met for lunch at Real Food Nation, which is just like it sounds, I mean you can order Buffalo or Portobello.
The best part was that Sabrina Pratt and Julie Bystrom from Santa Fe Arts Commission who were my Poet Laureate pals showed up for a real Valentine's surprise.   Plus my daughter, Hope, who joined us last year as well.  We spread Kisses and Valentines to all and hit the road, two facilities to go.

I know you probably have a life so let me just say we turned left and should have turned right.  They were at nap-time at El Castillo, so Tobie zoomed us over to Ponce de Leon with a promise to return to El Castillo aprés-nap.  Tobie liked the looks of El Castillo and was contemplating signing up for a room, but she hadn't met her Valentine yet.  At Ponce de Leon there were three women at the piano doing sing along.  We had a time slot, but we just had to wait it out, baskets of hot throbbing Valentines in hand and Hershey's Kisses, both dark and light and Hugs, melting in out pockets.  Tobie tried to give a man a card and he wanted to throw away what he called this piece of paper.  She explained it was for him and he couldn't quite get it in his pocket, so she helped him.  At which point he asked for her phone number and assured us his wife was dead, either a few months or years.  After we sang along with the three women who had matching Valentine's scarves, each tied in a different style, it was my turn to go.  I read them poems, we sang our hit, A Bushel and a Peck, and distributed cards.  I give my performance 2 and 1/2 chiles (that's out of four chiles as anyone who reads our local papers knows). One sweet moment was Helga speaking Portuguese to one of the residents she knew.

Meanwhile, back at El Castillo, they were awake and gathered and singing along with a karaoke duo.
We had lost all but Tobie, Marguerite, Maureen, and me by this time and who could blame the deserters, not I.  We are glad we hung in though, because it was the piece de resistance, which is French for four chiles. I read my love poems and then Gertrude Stein's "A Very Valentine," which I was reading everywhere. Gertrude lived in Paris and died in 1946 so I missed her by one year:
Very fine is my valentine.
Very fine and very mine.
Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.
Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and
mine is my valentine.

Joan and Woman I danced with on the Plaza

Marguerite and Joan

Marguerite asked me to read Stein again, and I did and I swear it had so much more feeling and depth.

I always got Gertrude, but I super got Gertrude by the end of this adventurous and love filled day.

There were four outstanding people at El Castillo. One was the wife of a man who'd had a stroke. Again, young looking, and she just stood by her man radiating love.  She told me he liked to write.

There was another guy who, when I asked if anyone had memorized a poem, recited a bit of Kubla Kahn to us and said he had memorized the entire poem.  There was the woman who I danced with Fourth of July on the Plaza and who sent me her family history. And, there was Marvin, who kept telling me he was very old and when I flatter-guessed 83 said, "No, 104!"  

When I was incredulous he showed me his tee-shirt.  It was made by students from Santa Fe Prep for him.  But here's the kicker.  Where was he from?  Los Alamos.   I am definitely moving.